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DAC 2015: Day One


It requires a certain dedication to attend technical DAC sessions on a Sunday morning, but full day workshops start before 9:00am for those dedicated to hearing about the latest work being conducted in academia and the research arm of industry. These are highly technical sessions that target academics and those serious about keeping a pulse on up and coming technologies. One such workshop wa... » read more

Memory Design At 16/14nm


As we get older the memory may start to fade, but that is not a viable option if we are talking about embedded memory. Chips contain increasing amounts of memory, and for many designs memory consumes more than half of the total chip area. “At 28nm we saw a few people with greater than 400Mbits of memory on chip,” says Prasad Saggurti, product marketing manager for Embedded Memory IP at [... » read more

Full Coverage Or Full Monty


Without adequate coverage metrics and tools, verification engineers would never be able to answer the proverbial question: Are we done yet? But a lot has changed in the design flow since the existing set of metrics was defined. Does it still ensure that the right things get verified, that time is not wasted on things deemed unimportant or a duplication of effort, and can it handle today’s hie... » read more

Rethinking Patents


Over the past few years the pressure on the patent system as a means of protecting intellectual property has been tested to the limit, and many changes are being made in an attempt to keep it viable. But in an age of globalization, coupled with the fact that for the patent system to work there has to be an infrastructure of suitable enforcement, it may be time to rethink its viability—especia... » read more

Problems Ahead for EDA


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with [getperson id="11411" comment="Bill Neifert"], chief technology officer at [getentity id="22521" comment="Carbon Design Systems"]; [getperson id="11032" comment="Simon Davidmann”], chief executive officer for [getentity id="22036" e_name="Imperas”]; Randy Smith, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"] and Michel Courtoy,... » read more

Trouble Ahead For IP industry?


[getkc id="106" kc_name="Power-aware design"] has risen from an afterthought to a primary design constraint for some design types. Initially it was smart phones and other battery operated devices. It has consistently expanded into additional areas including those plugged into the wall and those plugged into the grid. Some parts of the world are imposing restrictions on the power that a device c... » read more

Accelerating Development For LP


Power is a limiting factor in all devices these days, and while most of the industry has seen this coming for several process nodes and a succession of mobile devices with limited battery life, the power problem remains a work in progress. No matter how much progress is made—and there has been plenty of work done in the areas of multiple power domains, dark silicon, dynamic voltage and fr... » read more

Problems Ahead For EDA


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with [getperson id="11411" comment="Bill Neifert"], chief technology officer at [getentity id="22521" comment="Carbon Design Systems"]; [getperson id="11032" comment="Simon Davidmann”], chief executive officer for [getentity id="22036" e_name="Imperas”]; Randy Smith, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"] and Michel Courtoy,... » read more

Problems Ahead For EDA


You may have discovered that the Semiconductor Engineering Knowledge Center (KC) provides various ways in which data can be viewed. One way is to see what events happened in a given year. During the 1990s, company activity in terms of new startups and acquisitions reached a peak, and in 1997 there were at least 29 startups that the KC contains and 25 companies acquired (let us know if there wer... » read more

Is Art Acceptable In Verification?


The industry appears to have accepted that [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"] involves art as well as science. This is usually based on one of three reasons, namely: the problem is large and complex; there is a lack of understanding and tools that enable it to be automated; and if it could be made a science, all of the jobs would have migrated offshore. Today, designs are built from pre-... » read more

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