Blog Review: Jan. 25

Cadence’s Shyam Sharma shares some important design and verification considerations when working with DDR5 SDRAM and DDR5 DIMM-based memory subsystems, including reset and power on initialization, speed bin compliance, and refresh, RFM, and temperature requirements.

Siemens EDA’s Harry Foster examines trends in adoption of languages and libraries for IC and ASIC design, testbench creation, assertions, and verification methodologies, finding an increase in adoption of C/C++ for testbench development.

Synopsys’ Anand Thiruvengadam, Farzin Rasteh, Preeti Jain, and Jim Schultz find that with growing demands for more memory, more application-specific variants of memory chips, and complex architectures such as multi-die, development teams should shift the memory development process left while adopting design and verification techniques that have proven themselves on the digital side.

Ansys’ Andy Byers shares observations from the COP27 meeting on climate change, including the massive shift of capital needed to fund the energy transition, the need to scale up technologies that already exist, and the dangers of greenwashing.

Arm’s Nicolas Devillard announces that the company has opened contributions to PSA Certified APIs, a range of embedded software APIs designed to ease industry collaboration around best practices and software standards.

Renesas’ Daisuke Akita points to how quantization helps make it possible to perform real-time CNN processing on an in-vehicle SoC and the different simulators that can be used to ensure accuracy.

SEMI’s James Amano invites startups, academics, and innovators with ideas for advancing semiconductor industry sustainability to apply for a mentoring program on how to break into the semiconductor space and pitch to investors.

Nvidia’s Ned Finkle expects digital twins to play a key role in bringing more advanced semiconductor fabs to the U.S.

And check out the blogs featured in the latest Manufacturing, Packaging & Materials newsletter:

Technology Editor Katherine Derbyshire points out the latest research for a deeper dive into the world of ferroelectric materials.

Amkor’s Vik Chaudhry foresees advanced packaging exceeding the mainstream segment for the first time by 2027.

SEMI’s Cassandra Melvin summarizes the latest wisdom on sustainability — it means more than simply switching to renewable energy sources.