Author's Latest Posts


Barriers To Chiplet Sockets


Experts At The Table: Demand for chiplets is growing, but debate continues about whether standards and general-purpose chiplets will kick-start the commercialization boom, or whether success will come through customization of those chiplets. Semiconductor Engineeering sat down to discuss these and other related issues with Elad Alon, CEO of Blue Cheetah; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technol... » read more

Pressure Builds To Adopt Virtual Prototypes


Virtual prototypes, often used as a niche tool in the past, are becoming essential for developing complex systems. In fact, systems companies are finding they no longer can function without them. In the semiconductor industry, a virtual prototype is a model for a system at an abstraction level above RTL. But there is no such thing as 'the' virtual prototype. They are constructed for a partic... » read more

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what will trigger the creation of a commercial chiplet marketplace, and what those chiplet-based designs will look like, with Elad Alon, CEO of Blue Cheetah; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; Kevin Yee, senior director of IP and ecosystem marketing at Samsung; Sailesh Kumar, CEO of Baya Systems; and Tanuja... » read more

Is PPA Relevant Today?


The optimization of power, performance, and area (PPA) has been at the core of chip design since the dawn of EDA, but these metrics are becoming less valuable without the context of how and where these chips will be used. Unlike in the past, however, that context now comes from factors outside of hardware development. And while PPA still serves as a useful proxy for many parts of the hardwar... » read more

A New Generation Of 7400 Socket


When I was 18, and just been accepted at Brunel University in West London to start my undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, I sent off a letter to Texas Instruments telling them about the journey ahead of me and asked if they could they send me a copy of their TTL Data Book. A few weeks later a package arrived and there it was. This incredible brown/orange book, thicker... » read more

Defining The Chiplet Socket


Experts At The Table: The semiconductor industry has been buzzing with the possibilities surrounding chiplets, but so far this packaging technology has been confined to large semiconductor companies that are vertically integrated. The industry has been attempting to open this up to a broader group of people. To work out what this means for chiplets, and what standardization will be required, Se... » read more

Reusable Power Models


Power is not a new concern, and proprietary models are available for some tasks, but the industry lacks standardization. The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) is hoping to help resolve that with an upcoming release of IEEE 2416, based on its Unified Power Model (UPM) work. The creation of any model is not to be taken lightly. There is a cost to its creation, verification and maintenance. ... » read more

Capturing Knowledge Within LLMs


At DAC this year, there was a lot of talk about AI and the impact it is likely to have. While EDA companies have been using it for optimization and improving iteration loops within the flow, the end users have been concentrating on how to use it to improve the user interface between engineers and tools. The feedback is very positive. Large language models (LLMs) have been trained on a huge a... » read more

Will AI Disrupt EDA?


Generative AI has disrupted search, it is transforming the computing landscape, and now it's threatening to disrupt EDA. But despite the buzz and the broad pronouncements of radical changes ahead, it remains unclear where it will have impact and how deep any changes will be. EDA has two primary roles — automation and optimization. Many of the optimization problems are NP hard, which means ... » read more

Verification Tools Straining To Keep Up


Verification engineers are the unsung heroes of the semiconductor industry, but they are at a breaking point and desperately in need of modern tools and flows to deal with the rapidly increasing pressures. Verification is no longer just about ensuring that functionality is faithfully represented in an implementation. That alone is an insolvable task, but verification has taken on many new re... » read more

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