Optimizing For Energy In Physical Design


Energy is a precious resource, which should not be wasted. Energy drives economies and sustains societies. Predictions show that the energy of electronics may soon consume 20% to 33% of the global energy supply, as it is highlighted in this blog post about "Design and Manufacturing in 2030" from Greg Yeric, fellow at Arm. Energy efficiency is such an important global issue that it is ... » read more

A Historical Case For Precision


We take for granted today the staggering precision of modern technology. Cars, electronics, robots, and medical equipment all come off the factory floor composed of effortlessly interchangeable parts, but this was not always the case. In the late 18th century most things that required any kind of precision were made by hand, one notable example being the flintlock musket. You see, back then if ... » read more

OIP Ecosystem Forum 2020


Last Tuesday was the virtual TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum. Apart from being virtual, the format was similar to the usual. Cliff Hou, Senior Vice President of Technology Development, opened the day with a summary of where everything is in the ecosystem around each of the new processes. There were then three keynotes by the leaders of the three big EDA companies. That was followed by more technical ... » read more

Learn How To Streamline Design Flows And Reduce Design Cost


I’m excited to announce that general registration is now open for the new Ansys IDEAS Digital Forum!  IDEAS, hosted by Ansys Semiconductor, is a virtual gathering of top industry executives, thought leaders, and designers from some of the biggest IP, chip design, semiconductor foundry and electronic system companies in the world. Log in to IDEAS to join with your peers to listen to industry ... » read more

The Emergence Of Hardware As A Key Enabler For The Age Of Artificial Intelligence


Over the past few decades, software has been the engine of innovation for countless applications. From PCs to mobile phones, well-defined hardware platforms and instruction set architectures (ISA) have enabled many important advancements across vertical markets. The emergence of abundant-data computing is changing the software-hardware balance in a dramatic way. Diverse AI applications in fa... » read more

Mission Profiles In The Automotive Development Process


The automotive industry's roadmap for the coming years is e-mobility and autonomous driving. Its implementation is likely to bring about changes on a par with the invention of the automobile itself. While the motor vehicle used to be primarily a mechanical product, it is now an entirely electronic system. Many of the new functions increase the safety of the driver and other road users, and t... » read more

How UVM Callbacks Simplify Assertion Validation


By Akshay Sarup and Mark Olen Assertions bring immediate benefits to the whole design and verification cycle; thus any challenges engineers face in coding and testing them are worth resolving. When a large number of assertions are to be validated, callbacks save time by eliminating the need to code a new sequence for each scenario. Callbacks also provide more dynamic and fine-grained cont... » read more

Scaling AI/ML Training Performance With HBM2E Memory


In my April SemiEngineering Low Power-High Performance blog, I wrote: “Today, AI/ML neural network training models can exceed 10 billion parameters, soon it will be over 100 billion.” “Soon” didn’t take long to arrive. At the end of May, OpenAI unveiled a new 175-billion parameter GPT-3 language model. This represented a more that 100X jump over the size of GPT-2’s 1.5 billion param... » read more

Semiconductors And The Climate Curve


On July 22 I participated in a panel at the virtual SEMICON West conference called “Bending the Climate Curve: Enabling Sustainable Growth of Big Data, AI, and Cloud Computing.” Virtual conferences are mandatory these days, but give a different experience than physical ones. They are very good at disseminating information and are reasonably effective at networking. But, in my experience... » read more

Managing Worst Case Power Conditions


With each new technology node, especially FinFET, the dynamic conditions within a chip are changing and becoming more complex in terms of process speeds, thermal activity and supply variation. Dennard scaling brought about the ability for power to be scaled down with each successive node so that power per unit area stayed roughly constant. However, as highlighted by John Hennessy at last y... » read more

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