Times Are Changing For EDA


The EDA industry is about 50 years old, and I see the people responsible for its first generation setting their LinkedIn employment status to 'retired, at home' almost daily. I, for one, have a foot in that camp, but reporting/writing is different than having a full-time job because I can control the time commitment. We have seen many serial entrepreneurs who have created several successful com... » read more

How AI And Connected Workflows Will Close The Verification Bottleneck


For decades, verification has been the unsung hero of chip development—quietly catching bugs before they reach silicon. But as semiconductor complexity has skyrocketed, verification has turned into the bottleneck of development cycles. This challenge has a name: Verification Productivity Gap 2.0. Back in the early 2000s, the Verification Productivity Gap 1.0 emerged when design complexi... » read more

High-Speed High-Capacity Mixed-Signal Simulation Of Silicon Photonics


Many of today’s computing and communications applications demand almost unimaginable processing capability and high-bandwidth access to memory. For example, many data center systems using high-end Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) often need to transfer multiple terabytes per second. Traditional copper-based interconnects, limited to speeds of hundreds of megabits per second (Mbps), cannot ... » read more

Unleashing AI Potential Through Advanced Chiplet Architectures


The rapid proliferation of machine-generated data is driving unprecedented demand for scalable AI infrastructure, placing extreme pressure on compute and connectivity within data centers. As the power requirements and carbon footprint of AI workloads rise, there is a critical need for efficient, high-performance hardware solutions to meet growing demands. Traditional monolithic ICs will not sca... » read more

Innovating For 6G


As the world eagerly anticipates the arrival of applicable 6G innovations, researchers face numerous challenges in validating this next-generation wireless communication technology. The journey from theoretical concepts and mathematical equations to real-world 6G implementation is complex and requires meticulous planning, testing, and measurements to better characterize these ultra-high freque... » read more

Challenges In Managing Chiplet Resources


Managing chiplet resources is emerging as a significant and multi-faceted challenge as chiplets expand beyond the proprietary designs of large chipmakers and interact with other elements in a package or system. Poor resource management in chiplets adds an entirely new dimension to the usual power, performance, and area tradeoffs. It can lead to performance bottlenecks, because as chiplets co... » read more

First-Time Silicon Success Plummets


First-time silicon success is falling sharply due to rising complexity, the need for more iterations as chipmakers shift from monolithic chips to multi-die assemblies, and an increasing amount of customization that makes design and verification more time-consuming. Details from a new functional verification survey[1] highlight the growing difficulty of developing advanced chips that are both... » read more

Achieving Lower Power, Better Performance, And Optimized Wire Length In Advanced SoC Designs


In system-on-chip (SoC) design, wire length refers to the total physical distance of interconnects within a network-on-chip (NoC). It is a critical parameter that influences performance, power consumption, and manufacturing costs. Today’s SoCs incorporate numerous IP blocks connected by multiple complex NoCs and require efficient management of wire lengths. Excessive wire length increases lat... » read more

A Novel Approach For HW/SW Co-Verification


The complexity of system on chips (SoCs) continues to grow rapidly. Accordingly, new standards and methodologies are introduced to overcome these verification challenges. The Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) from Accellera is one of the standard examples used to pursue such challenges. In this paper we will show a methodology to use PSS to orchestrate the process of HW/SW co-verificati... » read more

Digital Twins For Design And Verification Workflows


Experts At The Table: AI is starting to impact several parts of the EDA design and verification flows, but so far these improvements are isolated to a single tool or small flows provided by a single company. What is required is a digital twin of the development process itself, on which AI can operate. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, including Johannes Stahl, senior d... » read more

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