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Research Bits: March 6


2D TMDs on silicon Engineers at MIT, University of Texas at Dallas, Institute for Basic Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of California at Riverside, ISAC Research, and Yonsei University found a way to grow 2D materials on industry-standard silicon wafers while preserving their crystalline form. Using a new “nonepitaxial, single-crystalline g... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Apple plans to spend an additional €1 billion (~$1.1B) over the next six years to expand its Munich, Germany-based Silicon Design Centre, including the construction of a new research facility. "The expansion of our European Silicon Design Centre will enable an even closer collaboration between our more than 2,000 engineers in Bavaria working on breakthrough innovations, including custom sil... » read more

Blog Review: March 1


Siemens EDA's Chris Spear explains the UVM Factory and how it can facilitate collaboration by enabling injection of new features without affecting your team. Cadence's Paul McLellan looks at efforts to ensure chiplets from different companies work together, particularly when the creating companies didn't pre-plan for those specific chiplets to work together, as well as the problems of failur... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 22


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster observes that the FPGA market continues to go through a similar complexity curve that the IC/ASIC market experienced in the early and mid-2000 timeframe. Synopsys' Mitch Heins explores the benefits of heterogeneous integration of lasers and active gain elements in a silicon-based photonic IC, including reduced system costs, size, weight, and power along with improv... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 15


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster examines the relationship between verification maturity and non-trivial bug escapes into production, as well as whether safety critical development processes yield higher quality in terms of preventing bugs and achieving silicon success. Synopsys' Shankar Krishnamoorthy finds that the rapid progress of machine learning models is driving demand for more domain-speci... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm is heading for an IPO this year, with plans "fairly well developed and underway now," CEO Rene Haas told Reuters. Arm reported fiscal Q3 revenue of $746 million, up 28% compared with the same period in 2021, setting the stage for a public offering. The company noted it had double- or triple-revenue increases in automotive, consumer, infrastructure, and IoT. The Si2 Compact Model Coalit... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 8


Cadence's Sanjeet Kumar points to key changes and optimizations that are done for USB3 Gen T compared to USB3 Gen X tunneling in order to minimize tunnel overhead and maximize USB3 throughput. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster considers the effectiveness of IC and ASIC verification by looking at schedule overruns, number of required spins, and classification of functional bugs. Synopsys' Chris C... » read more

Research Bits: Feb. 6


Pillars for chiplet integration Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology proposed a new chiplet integration technology called Pillar-Suspended Bridge (PSB), which they say is a simpler method of chip-to-chip connection compared to silicon interposers and redistribution layers. In the PSB, only a pillar-shaped metal structure called a "MicroPillar" is interposed at the connection b... » read more

Week in Review: Design, Low Power


Intel discontinued its Pathfinder for RISC-V program, according to numerous reports. The program provided a pre-silicon development environment to support IP selection and early-stage software development using Intel FPGA and simulator platforms. "Since Intel will not be providing any additional releases or bug fixes, we encourage you to promptly transition to third-party RISC-V software tools ... » read more

Startup Funding: January 2023


Quantum computing had a good month in January, collectively raising over $240 million. A significant chunk of that went to a full-stack quantum company whose processers use neutral atoms manipulated by optical tweezers. Other companies funded this month are developing trapped ion processors, photonics-based processors, and quantum memories, which will be essential for quantum networking. Two co... » read more

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