February 2019 - Semiconductor Engineering


Crisis In Data


The push toward data-driven design, debug, manufacturing and reliability holds huge promise, but the big risk is none of this will happen in an organized fashion and everyone will be frustrated. One of the clear messages coming out of DVCon this week is that standards need to be established for data. Even within large chipmakers and systems companies, the data they extract from tools is not ... » read more

Follow The Data


What does antitrust mean in the age of data? Data is in many cases gathered for free and has huge value to those who can turn that data into information and make decisions based on it. Amazon has become an example in retail because they see more sales data than any other retailer – not just what they sell, but what others choose to sell on their platform. Amazon gets to see all the data an... » read more

The Time Is Now For A Common Model Interface


By Ahmed Ramadan and Greg Curtis Driven by consumer demand for “cheaper, faster, and better,” the semiconductor industry is continually pushing the migration to smaller process geometries. This continued scaling of complex designs into advanced process nodes is critical for applications ranging from high-performance computing to low-power mobile devices. In the past, products like sma... » read more

Accelerate SSD Software Development And System Validation


The amount of data coming at us or that we produce ourselves in our daily lives continues to grow exponentially. It’s become the norm to stream movies and TV series from Netflix, as well as upload our own videos on YouTube. On top of this, a major shift in automotive (ADAS, autonomous driving) and surveillance are boosting the amount of data exchange that is happening every second. With th... » read more

Hot Technologies In Cold Weather


It is a busy week for verification and software development. DVCon in San Jose; Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany; and Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain are all happening at the same time. I ended up covering embedded software in Germany (as I also had a paper on “Shift Left” here). At chilly minus 1° Celsius in the morning, the technologies had to be pretty hot to warm me... » read more

Formal Verification Of RISC-V Cores


RISC-V is hot and stands at the beginning of what may be a major shift in the industry. Even a cursory review of upcoming conferences programs and recent technical articles makes that clear. While it is still early in the evolution of the processor architecture, there is certainly the potential that RISC-V will be a game-changer in the IP and semiconductor industry. As “a free and open ISA en... » read more

New Memory Options


Carlos Macián, eSilicon’s senior director of AI strategy and products, talks about how to utilize memory differently and reduce the movement of data in AI chips, and what impact that has on power and performance. https://youtu.be/wItp6wReVts » read more

The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance


The open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) continues to gain momentum, but the flexibility of RISC-V creates a problem—how do you know if a RISC-V implementation fits basic standards and can play well with other implementations so they all can run the same ecosystem? In addition, how do you ensure that ecosystem development works for all implementations and that all cores that ... » read more

Inaccurate Assumptions Mean Software Issues


It doesn’t seem that long ago when features and functionality were being added to next generation processors and SoCs ahead of demand. Actually, I recall when new processors were released, embedded software developers were forced to think of innovative ways to exploit the new features in order to differentiate the product to not be left behind. Today, in many respects it seems as if the... » read more

The Problem With Post-Silicon Debug


Semiconductor engineers traditionally have focused on trying to create 'perfect' GDSII at tape-out, but factors such as hardware-software interactions, increasingly heterogeneous designs, and the introduction of AI are forcing companies to rethink that approach. In the past, chipmakers typically banked on longer product cycles and multiple iterations of silicon to identify problems. This no ... » read more

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