Author's Latest Posts


Virtualization In The Car


As the automotive industry grapples with complexity due to electrification and increasing autonomy of vehicles, consolidation of ECUs within vehicles, more stringent safety and security requirements, automotive ecosystem players are looking to virtualization concepts in a number of ways to realize the vehicles of tomorrow. One way is with hardware virtualization; the ability of a device such... » read more

Problems And Solutions In Analog Design


Advanced chip design is becoming a great equalizer for analog and digital at each new node. Analog IP has more digital circuitry, and digital designs are more susceptible to kinds of noise and signal disruption that have plagued analog designs for years. This is making the design, test and packaging of SoCs much more complicated. Analog components cause the most chip production test failures... » read more

Pivoting Toward Safety-Critical Verification In Cars


The inclusion of AI chips in automotive and increasingly in avionics has put a spotlight on advanced-node designs that can meet all of the ASIL-D requirements for temperature and stress. How should designers approach this task, particularly when these devices need to last longer than the applications? Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Kurt Shuler, vice president of... » read more

Universal Verification Methodology Running Out Of Steam


For the past decade or so, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) has been the de facto verification methodology supported by the entire EDA industry. But as chips become more heterogeneous, more complex, and significantly larger, UVM is running out of steam. Consensus is building that some fundamental changes are required, moving tools up a level of abstraction and making them more ag... » read more

EDA On Board With New Package Options


A groundswell of activity around multi-die integration and advanced packaging is pushing EDA companies to develop integration strategies that speed up time to sign-off, increase confidence that a design will work as expected, while still leaving enough room for highly customized solutions. Challenges range from how to architect a design, how to explore the best options and configurations, ho... » read more

DAC 2020 Day One


DAC 2020 is like no other Design Automation Conference. It is virtual for this year — and hopefully only this year. The COVID pandemic has proven that face-to-face meetings and conferences are invaluable for many reasons. But with none of the distractions of a traditional conference, focusing on the content was easy. And because the sessions have been pre-recorded, the speakers for each se... » read more

Why Safety-Critical Verification Is So Difficult


The inclusion of AI chips in automotive and increasingly in avionics has put a spotlight on advanced-node designs that can meet all of the ASIL-D requirements for temperature and stress. How should designers approach this task, particularly when these devices need to last longer than the applications? Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Kurt Shuler, vice president of... » read more

Power Impact At The Physical Layer Causes Downstream Effects


Data movement is rapidly emerging as one of the top design challenges, and it is being complicated by new chip architectures and physical effects caused by increasing density at advanced nodes and in multi-chip systems. Until the introduction of the latest revs of high-bandwidth memory, as well as GDDR6, memory was considered the next big bottleneck. But other compute bottlenecks have been e... » read more

Variables Complicate Safety-Critical Device Verification


The inclusion of AI chips in automotive and increasingly in avionics has put a spotlight on advanced-node designs that can meet all of the ASIL-D requirements for temperature and stress. How should designers approach this task, particularly when these devices need to last longer than the applications? Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Kurt Shuler, vice president of... » read more

Over-Design, Under-Design Impacts Verification


Designing a complex chip today and getting it out the door on schedule and within budget — while including all of the necessary and anticipated features and standards — is forcing engineering teams to make more tradeoffs than in the past, and those tradeoffs now are occurring throughout the flow. In an ideal system design flow, design teams will have done early, pre-design analysis to se... » read more

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