Author's Latest Posts


Rocky Road To Designing Chips In The Cloud


EDA is moving to the cloud in fits and starts as tool vendors sort out complex financial models and tradeoffs while recognizing a potentially big new opportunity to provide unlimited processing capacity using a pay-as-you-go approach. By all accounts, a tremendous amount of tire-kicking is happening now as EDA vendors and users delve into the how and why of moving to the cloud for chip desig... » read more

EDA In The Cloud


Hagai Arbel, CEO of Vtool, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the benefits of moving EDA tools to the cloud, why it has been slow to take off, and what will drive this trend in the future. » read more

Big Changes Ahead For Connected Vehicles


Carmakers are reworking their electronic architectures so they can tap into a growing number of external services and internal options, similar to the way a data center taps into various services over its internal network. In the past, this has been largely confined to internal services such as on-board Internet connectivity, and external traffic routing and music. The current vision is to g... » read more

Pushing The Limits Of Hardware-Assisted Verification


As semiconductor complexity continues to escalate, so does the reliance on hardware-assisted simulation, emulation, and prototyping. Since chip design first began, engineers have complained their design goals exceeded the capabilities of the tools. This is especially evident in verification and debug, which continue to dominate the design cycle. Big-iron tooling has enabled design teams to k... » read more

Mapping Heat Across A System


Thermal issues are becoming more difficult to resolve as chip features get smaller and systems get faster and more complex. They now require the integration of technologies from both the design and manufacturing flows, making design for power and heat a much broader problem. This is evident with the evolution of a smart phone. Phones sold 10 years ago were very different devices. Functionali... » read more

IC Security Threat Grows As More Devices Are Connected


Designing for security is beginning to gain traction across a wider swath of chips and systems as more of them are connected to the Internet and to each other, sometimes in safety- and mission-critical markets where the impact of a cyber attack can be devastating. But it's also becoming more difficult to design security into these systems. Unlike in the past, connectivity is now considered e... » read more

The Verification Mindset


The practice of semiconductor verification has changed substantially over the years, and will continue to do so. The skillset needed for functional verification 20 years ago is hardly recognizable as a verification skillset today, and the same should be expected moving forward as design and verification becomes more abstract, the boundary of what is implemented in hardware versus firmware and s... » read more

RISC-V Targets Data Centers


RISC-V vendors are beginning to aim much higher in the compute hierarchy, targeting data centers and supercomputers rather than just simple embedded applications on the edge. In the past, this would have been nearly impossible for a new instruction set architecture. But a growing focus on heterogeneous chip integration, combined with the reduced benefits of scaling and increasing demand for ... » read more

More Data Drives Focus On IC Energy Efficiency


Computing workloads are becoming increasingly interdependent, raising the complexity level for chip architects as they work out exactly where that computing should be done and how to optimize it for shrinking energy margins. At a fundamental level, there is now more data to compute and more urgency in getting results. This situation has forced a rethinking of how much data should be moved, w... » read more

Privacy Protection A Must For Driver Monitoring


Driver monitoring systems are so tied into a vehicle's architecture that soon the driver will not be able to opt out because the vehicle will only operate if the driver is detected and monitored. This is raising privacy concerns about whether enough security is in place for the data to remain private. At the very least, laws and regulations in every geography where the vehicle will operate a... » read more

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