The Good Old Days Of EDA


Nostalgia is wonderful, but there is something about being involved in the formative years of an industry. Few people ever get to experience it, and it was probably one of the most fortuitous events to have happened in my life. Back in the early '80s, little in the way of design automation existed. There were a few gate- and transistor-level simulators, primarily for test and a few 'calculators... » read more

Nascent Chiplet Tech Gaining Attention In Defense and Commercial Industries


The economic benefits derived from Moore's Law have changed, and not for the better. This shift – especially on the manufacturing side of system-on-chip (SoC) devices, has both the defense and commercial customers in the semiconductor industry wondering what will come next. One way to extend Moore's Law's cost, feature, and size benefits is with multi-chip technology, now commonly known as... » read more

Considerations For Accelerating On-Device Stable Diffusion Models


One of the more powerful – and visually stunning – advances in generative AI has been the development of Stable Diffusion models. These models are used for image generation, image denoising, inpainting (reconstructing missing regions in an image), outpainting (generating new pixels that seamlessly extend an image's existing bounds), and bit diffusion. Stable Diffusion uses a type of dif... » read more

Help, 3D-IC Is Stuck In A Country Song


Every time I focus on three-dimensional (3D) integrated circuit (IC) design, I start hearing the Luke Bryan song “Rain Makes Corn, Corn Makes Whiskey.” Not because I need a strong drink to work with 3D-IC designs, but because there is a similar, although slightly more complicated, series of cause and effect issues that impact 3D-ICs. Pushing electrons through very thin metal wires and switc... » read more

A Path To Increase Cell Utilization Rate And Decrease Routing Congestion In Chip Design Floorplanning


What do chip floorplanning and city planning have in common? As it turns out, quite a lot. This was the premise for an award-winning talk given by MediaTek at this year’s Synopsys User Group (SNUG) in Taiwan. Urban city development was used as an example to understand how utilization rate (UR) and congestion relate to chip planning. UR was defined in the example as population density while... » read more

Artificial Intelligence Wonderland


Silicon Catalyst held its Sixth Annual Semiconductor Forum in Menlo Park on the SRI campus on November 9th. Richard Curtin, Managing Partner for Si Catalyst, opened the event with a reference to Arthur C. Clarke’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" and noted how remarkable it was that a novel written back in 1968 was able to foretell the direction of the computer industry over 50 years into the future. ... » read more

SoC Integration And Data Transport Architecture Requirements Surge In 2023


As the holiday season is in full swing, it's retrospection and prediction time! Let's look at what I thought 2023 would look like, review how it turned out, and take a first stab at 2024 predictions. As a spoiler, my biggest surprise was the intensity with which artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) accelerated since Generative AI was put on the mainstream adoption map last year,... » read more

Building Tomorrow’s Electronics Piece By Piece


The semiconductor landscape is undergoing a seismic shift as the demand for more powerful and energy-efficient electronic devices reaches new heights. In a recent panel discussion at CadenceLIVE Europe, featuring luminaries such as Kevork Kechichian from Arm, Paul Cunningham from Cadence, Norbert Schuhmann from Fraunhofer, Trent Uehling from NXP, Davide Rossi from the University of Bologna, an... » read more

Unlocking The Power Of Edge Computing With Large Language Models


In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, transforming how we interact with devices and the possibilities of what machines can achieve. These models have demonstrated remarkable natural language understanding and generation abilities, making them indispensable for various applications. However, LLMs are incredibly resource-intensi... » read more

The Limits Of AI-Generated Models


In several recent stories, the subject of models has come up, and one recurrent theme is that AI may be able to help us generate models of a required abstraction. While this may be true in some cases, it is very dangerous in others. If we generalize, AI should be good for any model where the results are predominantly continuous, but discontinuities create problems. Unless those are found and... » read more

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