Time To Rethink Memory Chip Design And Verification


It’s no secret to anyone that semiconductor development grows more challenging all the time. Each new process technology node packs more transistors into each die, creating more electrical issues and making heat dissipation harder. Floorplanning, logic synthesis, place and route, timing analysis, electrical analysis, and functional verification stretch electronic design automation (EDA) tools... » read more

Functional Safety: Current Status And Perspectives With A View Toward Standardization Bodies


Functional safety is a topic highly driven by standards. This is due in part to legislation and regulation, but it also arises from the fact that functional safety spans a wide range of fields. Even before specific standards were introduced, there were products that met the social consensus on safety. For example, carmakers were making cars that were safe and incorporated electrical and elec... » read more

PCB Design Rules For Wiring And Crosstalk


Today’s electronic devices market demands miniaturized printed circuit boards (PCBs) with a multitude of high-speed functions integrated on a single board. This causes the designers to have traces routed very close to each other to optimize packaging and space. This proximity may cause unintentional coupling of electromagnetic fields, a phenomenon which we know by the name of crosstalk (see f... » read more

GDDR6 Memory On The Leading Edge


With the accelerating growth in data traffic, it is unsurprising that the number of hyperscale data centers keeps rocketing skyward. According to analysts at the Synergy Research Group, in nine months (Q2’20 to Q1’21), 84 new hyperscale data centers came online bringing the total worldwide to 625. Hyperscaler capex set a record $150B over the last four quarters eclipsing the $121B spent in ... » read more

What Is Intern Reading Club?


As the summer winds down, interns are busy completing their assigned projects and preparing their end of summer presentations. These presentations have been a rite of passage for interns on the Pointwise team for many years and gives each intern a chance to show off what they learned and accomplished. And the rest of the team gets to hear all the details of what they've been working on. Anothe... » read more

Getting Realistic About AI


By Olaf Enge-Rosenblatt and Andy Heinig The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) is omnipresent today, both in the news and on popular science shows. The number of possibilities for AI methods to assist people in making decisions are expanding rapidly. There are three main reasons for this: The development of new AI methods (deep learning, reinforcement learning); The continuous ... » read more

ASIC/IC Verification Trends With A Focus On Factors Of Silicon Success


At long last we come to the final installment of our four-part series presenting the findings of the Wilson Research Group Functional Verification 2020 study. In this article we discuss verification trends in IC/ASIC language and library adoption, low power management, and verification effectiveness. We then take a deeper dive into two somewhat surprising phenomena revealed in the data: the ... » read more

For The Edge, It’s All About Location, Location, Location


They are centrally located, are connected to power grids and water systems, and are rapidly thinning out. And you can probably get a new cell phone case or a corn dog in the atrium. Could shopping malls become a future home for the edge? Edge computing has transformed over the last few years from being a vaguely defined concept to a fundamental part of the future data infrastructure. Band... » read more

Best 112G SerDes IP Architecture


Real world operation of a serializer/deserializer (SerDes) in a hyperscale data center is very demanding and requires robust performance in challenging conditions such as multitude of channel insertion loss, extreme temperature cycles, different types of packages with different trace lengths and discontinuities, etc. Hence, meeting interference tolerance (ITOL) and jitter tolerance (JTOL) compl... » read more

Hyperconnectivity’s Impact On Consumers


Do you know what hyperconnectivity is? It is already affecting you, whether you know it or not. Hyperscalers are the companies like AWS, Google, and Microsoft that build and run those enormous (aka hyperscale) data centers. If you are a designer and use the cloud, then you have at least a vague idea of what data centers are being used to handle your design. But even if you are the generic perso... » read more

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