Static Verification Of Low Power Designs


Are there any chips designed today that don’t have limitations on their power consumption? For smartphones and tablets, increasing the time between charges is a clear product differentiator and a frequent design goal. Power consumption is also an issue for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, many of which are in inaccessible locations where battery replacement or recharge is difficult. Even com... » read more

Functional Safety Implementation Goes Mainstream


Electronics engineers are being thrust into the automotive market like never before. The move to electrify automobiles, along with the advent of self-driving cars, means that silicon designers will be designing ever more sophisticated automotive ICs. But cars aren’t like most other electronic systems; it’s imperative that they cause no harm should they fail. This brings us to the realm o... » read more

No More Pizza! The Power Of HPC To Answer: “What’s For Dinner?”


The other night my wife and I were trying to pick a place we could both agree on for dinner. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you know it can be a difficult problem to solve. I decided to short circuit the usual torture by asking our virtual assistant for a solution. “Hey [Virtual Assistant], where’s a good place to eat?” Thus ensued 15 minutes of intermittent, wrong answers, misc... » read more

Clock Domain Crossing Signoff Through Static-Formal-Simulation


By Sudeep Mondal and Sean O'Donohue Clocking issues are one of the most common reasons for costly design re-spins. This has been the driving factor in the ever-increasing demand for Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) analysis tools. Today, the majority of IP and SoC teams are focusing on “Structural CDC” analysis, which is important but not sufficient. Structural CDC analysis ensures that the d... » read more

Which Glitch Is Which?


Glitch is a commonly used term in modern vernacular, used to identify unexpected problems in everything from the space race, web site down time, or a crash of your latest mobile phone app. In electronics design glitch has a more specific meaning, referring to unnecessary signal transitions in a combinational circuit. Eliminating this extra switching activity can save power consumption, especial... » read more

Automation And Correct By Construction Will Empower 3D-IC Adoption


When research on 3D ICs was in full swing around 2009, I had been researching on how through-silicon-via (TSV) was related to thermal in a semiconductor chip-making company, and it seemed logical that 3D ICs would become mainstream. However, during the past 10 years, use of 3D stacked die has been applied to only a few applications, such as memory or image sensors, and the 2.5D solution using i... » read more

Shift-Left Low Power Verification With UPF Information Model


By Himanshu Bhatt, Shreedhar Ramachandra and Narayanan Ganesan Low power testbenches today have no visibility of the UPF objects and their states during a low power simulation. This has been one of the factors limiting the users from writing re-usable low power testbenches that can monitor the UPF objects and react to the state changes of UPF objects. To meet this requirement for the user to... » read more

Where Are We On The Road To Artificial Intelligence In Chip Design?


It’s hard to find an article today that doesn’t talk about how Artificial Intelligence is going to solve every possible problem in the world. From self-driving cars, to robots running an entire hotel (in Japan), to voice assistants answering your every question, it appears that every problem can be solved with AI. As so often in life, the true answer is: it depends. It depends on the nature... » read more

Building Bridges: A New DFT Paradigm


Over the last twenty years, structural testing with scan chains has become pervasive in chip design methodology. Indeed, it’s remarkable to think that most electronic devices we interact with today (think smartphones, laptops, televisions, etc.) contain hundreds to thousands of interconnected scan chains used to verify that the semiconductors were manufactured without defects. Because the imp... » read more

Accelerate SSD Software Development And System Validation


The amount of data coming at us or that we produce ourselves in our daily lives continues to grow exponentially. It’s become the norm to stream movies and TV series from Netflix, as well as upload our own videos on YouTube. On top of this, a major shift in automotive (ADAS, autonomous driving) and surveillance are boosting the amount of data exchange that is happening every second. With th... » read more

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