The Seven Steps Of Formal Signoff


“Signoff” may be the most exciting—and frightening—word in semiconductor development. After many months, or even years of team effort, committing a design to silicon fabrication is indeed an exciting and rewarding event. But, there’s often significant anxiety involved as well – if any missed issues result in having to “turn” the chip, the increased costs and time-to-market delay... » read more

What Will The Next-Gen Verification Flow Look Like?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what's ahead for verification with Daniel Schostak, Arm fellow and verification architect; Ty Garibay, vice president of hardware engineering at Mythic; Balachandran Rajendran, CTO at Dell EMC; Saad Godil, director of applied deep learning research at Nvidia; and Nasr Ullah, senior director of performance architecture at SiFive. What follows are exc... » read more

Ensuring HBM Reliability


Igor Elkanovich, CTO of GUC, and Evelyn Landman, CTO of proteanTecs, talk with Semiconductor Engineering about difficulties that crop up in advanced packaging, what’s redundant and what is not when using high-bandwidth memory, and how continuous in-circuit monitoring can identify potential problems before they happen. » read more

Early Detection Of Power/Ground Shorts Speeds Time To Tapeout


Early detection of power/ground shorts lets design teams fix errors during implementation, avoiding time-consuming design data merging and full-chip physical verification. The Calibre platform provides fast, automated power/ground checking using abstract LEF/DEF input, significantly reducing the time and resources needed to ensure these violations are removed prior to tapeout. To read more, ... » read more

Plan-Based Analog Verification Methodology


The ability to verify all the aspects of an analog design and to keep track of all the different verification tasks is a growing challenge. Manual attempts to do so often lead to mistakes since they rely on constantly updated documents. The Cadence Virtuoso ADE Verifier provides an overarching verification plan that links to all analog tests across multiple designers. The Virtuoso ADE Verifier ... » read more

RTL Architect: Simply Better RTL


Electronic devices play a key role in society. They connect us to one another through voice, video and chat. They entertain, educate, protect and heal us in new and ever-expanding ways. They have changed the way we work, live and play. Silicon chips are the fast beating heart (2 to 3 billion beats per second) of these devices. For decades, the relentless advancements in semiconductor process te... » read more

The Good And Bad Of Chiplets


The chiplet model continues to gain traction in the market, but there are still some challenges to enable broader support for the technology. AMD, Intel, TSMC, Marvell and a few others have developed or demonstrated devices using chiplets, which is an alternative way to develop an advanced design. Beyond that, however, the adoption of chiplets is limited in the industry due to ecosystem issu... » read more

Blog Review: May 27


Mentor's Neil Johnson takes a look at achieving a practical verification methodology starting with an exclusively constrained random flow and building up by adding techniques and gauging the consequences. Cadence's Paul McLellan explains the history of neural networks and how we've been trying to mimic the brain for decades, only to see funding dry up until a sudden resurgence of annotated i... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 26


7-level nanosheets The 2020 Symposia on VLSI Technology & Circuits for the first time will be held as a virtual conference. The event, to be held from June 15-18, is organized around the theme “The Next 40 Years of VLSI for Ubiquitous Intelligence.” Among the papers at the event include advanced nanosheet transistors, 3D stacked memory devices and even an artificial iris. At the ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: May 26


Warmer quantum computing Researchers at the University of New South Wales Sydney, Université de Sherbrooke, Aalto University, and Keio University developed a proof-of-concept quantum processor unit cell on a silicon chip that works at 1.5 Kelvin – 15 times warmer than current chip-based technology that uses superconducting qubits. "This is still very cold, but is a temperature that can b... » read more

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