Author's Latest Posts


Chip Design Shifts As Fundamental Laws Run Out Of Steam


Dennard scaling is gone, Amdahl's Law is reaching its limit, and Moore's Law is becoming difficult and expensive to follow, particularly as power and performance benefits diminish. And while none of that has reduced opportunities for much faster, lower-power chips, it has significantly shifted the dynamics for their design and manufacturing. Rather than just different process nodes and half ... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Rattles Chip Design Ecosystem


Bespoke silicon developers are shaking up relationships, priorities, and methodologies across the semiconductor industry, creating demand for skills that cross traditional boundaries, and driving new business models that leverage these enormous investments. Bespoke silicon designers today are a rare breed, capable of understanding the unique requirements of a specific domain, as well as a gr... » read more

Designing A Better Clock Network


Laying the proper clock network architecture foundation makes all the difference for the best performance, power, and timing of a chip, particularly in advanced node SoCs packed with billions of transistors. Each transistor, which acts like a standard cell, needs a clock. An efficient clock network should ensure the switching transistors save power. In today’s advanced nodes, when a design... » read more

EVs Raise Energy, Power, And Thermal IC Design Challenges


The transition to electric vehicles is putting pressure on power grids to produce more energy and on vehicles to use that energy much more efficiently, creating a gargantuan set of challenges that will affect every segment of the automotive world, the infrastructure that supports it, and the chips that are required to make all of this work. From a semiconductor standpoint, improvements in th... » read more

Strengthening The Global Semi Supply Chain


Within the semiconductor ecosystem, there are a number of dynamics pointing to the need for new ways of partnering in more meaningful ways that bring resiliency to the global semiconductor supply chain. One of these is the move to bespoke silicon, stemming from a shift in the companies that create most SoCs today -- the hyperscalar cloud providers. These market leaders know their workloads so w... » read more

New Data Management Challenges


An explosion in semiconductor design and manufacturing data, and the expanding use of chips in safety-critical and mission-critical applications, is prompting chipmakers to collect and manage that data more effectively in order to improve overall performance and reliability. This collection of data reveals a number of challenges with no simple solutions. Data may be siloed and inconsistent, ... » read more

Design For Security Now Essential For Chips, Systems


It's nearly impossible to create a completely secure chip or system, but much can be done to raise the level of confidence about that security. In the past, security was something of an afterthought, disconnected from the architecture and added late in the design cycle. But as chips are used increasingly in safety- and mission-critical systems, and as the value of data continues to rise, the... » read more

Challenges Grow For Modeling Auto Performance, Power


Rising complexity in automobiles is creating huge challenges about how to add more safety and comfort features and electronics into vehicles without reducing the overall range they can travel or pricing them so high that only the rich can afford them. While the current focus is on modeling hardware and software to understand interactions between systems, this remains a huge challenge. It req... » read more

Is Standardization Required For Security?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip and system security with Mike Borza, fellow and scientist on the security IP team at Synopsys; Lee Harrison, automotive IC test solutions manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Jason Oberg, founder and CTO of Cycuity (formerly Tortuga Logic); Nicole Fern, senior security analyst at Riscure; Norman Chang, fellow and CTO of the electroni... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Redefines Custom ASICs


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss bespoke silicon and what's driving that customization with Kam Kittrell, vice president of product management in the Digital & Signoff group at Cadence; Rupert Baines, chief marketing officer at Codasip; Kevin McDermott, vice president of marketing at Imperas; Mo Faisal, CEO of Movellus; Ankur Gupta, vice president and general manager of Siemens... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →