Frank Schirrmeister

  (all posts)
Frank Schirrmeister is executive director, strategic programs, system solutions in Synopsys' System Design Group. He leads strategic activities across system software and hardware assisted development for industries like automotive, data center and 5G/6G communications, as well as for horizontals like AI/ML. Prior to Synopsys, Schirrmeister held various senior leadership positions at Arteris, Cadence Design Systems, Imperas, Chipvision and SICAN Microelectronics, focusing on product marketing and management, solutions, strategic ecosystem partner initiatives, and customer engagement. He holds an MSEE from the Technical University of Berlin and actively participates in cross-industry initiatives as chair of the Design Automation Conference's Engineering Tracks.

Author's Latest Posts

The Path Toward Future Automotive EE Architectures
By Frank Schirrmeister - 25 Apr, 2024 - Comments: 0

From a semiconductor market perspective, all eyes are on the automotive domain. According to Gartner, as of 2023, the automotive market is now its second-largest segment, with about 14% of the demand. Only smartphones consume more. As I mused last month in "Automotive Semiconductor March Madness 2024," those who made a bet on automotive a decade or longer ago are pretty happy these days. Still,... » read more

Automotive Semiconductor March Madness 2024
By Frank Schirrmeister - 28 Mar, 2024 - Comments: 0

As the US is amid "Basketball March Madness" – hard to ignore when you live in Silicon Valley – it also felt like the month of "Automotive Madness." We saw numerous announcements and events across the design chain, from semiconductor IP to software and IP providers to automotive OEMs. And in all of them, data-transport architectures, and with that networks-on-chips (NoCs), are critical. Ma... » read more

NoC Development – Make Or Buy?
By Frank Schirrmeister - 29 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 0

In the selection and qualification process for semiconductor IP, design teams often consider the cost of in-house development. Network-on-Chip (NoC) IP is no different. In “When Does My SoC Design Need A NoC?” Michael Frank and I argued that most of today’s designs – even less complex ones – can benefit from NoCs. In the blog “Balancing Memory And Coherence: Navigating Modern Chip A... » read more

Will 2024 Be The Year Of Layered Realities?
By Frank Schirrmeister - 25 Jan, 2024 - Comments: 0

January is always the month of predictions. Our team has already contributed to Semiconductor Engineering's 2023 Look Back and 2024 Outlook. My personal tradition has become to combine the outlook with a look back at what industry experts thought of a decade ago. While this involved a trip to my garage to pick up the respective January IEEE Spectrum issue a decade ago, the new reality is that a... » read more

Balancing Memory And Coherence: Navigating Modern Chip Architectures
By Frank Schirrmeister - 21 Dec, 2023 - Comments: 0

In the intricate world of modern chip architectures, the "memory wall" – the limitations posed by external DRAM accesses on performance and power consumption growing slower than the ability to compute data – has emerged as a pivotal challenge. Architects must strike a delicate balance between leveraging local data reuse and managing external memory accesses. While caches are critical for op... » read more

SoC Integration And Data Transport Architecture Requirements Surge In 2023
By Frank Schirrmeister - 30 Nov, 2023 - Comments: 0

As the holiday season is in full swing, it's retrospection and prediction time! Let's look at what I thought 2023 would look like, review how it turned out, and take a first stab at 2024 predictions. As a spoiler, my biggest surprise was the intensity with which artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) accelerated since Generative AI was put on the mainstream adoption map last year,... » read more

System-on-Chip Integration Complexity And Hardware/Software Contracts
By Frank Schirrmeister - 26 Oct, 2023 - Comments: 0

From the earliest days of my career, when designing chips, I have always navigated the interface between hardware and software for semiconductor design in my roles. My initial chip designs included video and audio encoding and decoding, supporting standards like MPEG and H.261. As acceleration parts of hardware/software systems, these had many Control and Status Registers (CSRs) to program. The... » read more

Network-on-Chips Enabling Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Everywhere
By Frank Schirrmeister - 28 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

Recently, I attended the AI HW Summit in Santa Clara and Autosens in Brussels. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) were critical themes for both events, albeit from different angles. While AI/ML as a buzzword is very popular these days in all its good and bad ways, in discussions with customers and prospects, it became clear that we need to be precise in defining what type of A... » read more

Design Complexity In The Golden Age Of Semiconductors
By Frank Schirrmeister - 24 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

While writing last month's blog that used some of the trend charts we have seen, I noticed that a lot of the data ends in 2020 or earlier, but I was too close to the deadline to sit down and make orderly updates to some of the charts. Working day-to-day in the area of SoC integration and networks-on-chips (NoCs), the classic chart based on Karl Rupp's now 50 years of processor data that overlay... » read more

DAC 2023: Megatrends And The Road Ahead For Design Automation
By Frank Schirrmeister - 27 Jul, 2023 - Comments: 0

As Silicon Valley is in the midst of the heat wave the world is experiencing, the recent Design Automation Conference and its exhibition discussed hot technologies. Three megatrends defined the current situation – artificial intelligence (AI), chiplets, and integration. To me, the more exciting aspect of DAC was the discussion of what is ahead for EDA in the decade to come, and for that, the ... » read more

← Older posts

  • Sponsors

About

Navigation

Connect With Us

Copyright ©2013-2024 SMG   |  Terms of Service  |  Privacy Policy