Blog Review: Feb. 27

Mentor’s Harry Foster checks out the trends in language and library adoption for IC/ASIC designs and finds increased adoption of SystemVerilog for both design and verification while UVM remains the dominant verification methodology.

Synopsys’ Taylor Armerding chats with Chris Clark of Synopsys and Tim Weisenberger of SAE about the weakest points in automotive security and why it’s time to move security testing earlier in the software development cycle.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan points to a proposal to add four new prefixes for very, very small and very, very large numbers.

Arm’s Ian Pilkington contends that widespread consumer take-up of augmented reality devices could be as little as four years away, with AR for business applications leading the way and new consumer demos popping up at CES.

Verification blogger Gaurav Jalan chats with Tom Fitzpatrick, the recipient of this year’s Accellera Technical Excellence Award, about the evolution of verification technologies, standards, and the challenges still ahead.

A Rambus writers checks out the latest updates to the High Bandwidth Memory standard, which leverages wide I/O and TSV technologies to support densities up to 24 GB per device and speeds up to 307 GB/s.

Walt Custer of Custer Consulting Group considers the fourth quarter’s slowing growth and points to Taiwan wafer fab sales and Purchasing Manager Indices as ways to gauge what happens next.

Lam Research’s Shelly Miyasato considers whether pilotless passenger jets are on the horizon, and the most challenging aspect of getting them in the air.

Lithography blogger Chris Mack shares highlights from the first day of the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium.

And don’t forget to check out the featured blogs from last week’s Manufacturing & Process Technology newsletter:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling looks at why regularly scheduled equipment maintenance is nearing the end, and what comes next.

Editor Mark LaPedus finds the scaling race and whether NAND shortages will emerge are now the topics of interest.

Coventor’s Timothy Yang examines the manufacturing issues associated with increased 3D NAND density to make the best tradeoffs and avoid structural collapse.

Applied Materials’ Ryan Gibson observes that as DRAM and NAND become more specialized, entirely new memory architectures are on the horizon.

SEMI’s David Anderson calls for a new way to set roadmaps, because geopolitical unrest, and new technologies such as AI, VR, and 5G have put the industry in the midst of a major inflection point.