Balancing Memory And Coherence: Navigating Modern Chip Architectures

By Frank Schirrmeister - 21 Dec, 2023 - Comments: 0

In the intricate world of modern chip architectures, the "memory wall" – the limitations posed by external DRAM accesses on performance and power consumption growing slower than the ability to compute data – has emerged as a pivotal challenge. Architects must strike a delicate balance between leveraging local data reuse and managing external memory accesses. While caches are critical for op... » read more

SoC Integration And Data Transport Architecture Requirements Surge In 2023

By Frank Schirrmeister - 30 Nov, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

System-on-Chip Integration Complexity And Hardware/Software Contracts

By Frank Schirrmeister - 26 Oct, 2023 - Comments: 0

From the earliest days of my career, when designing chips, I have always navigated the interface between hardware and software for semiconductor design in my roles. My initial chip designs included video and audio encoding and decoding, supporting standards like MPEG and H.261. As acceleration parts of hardware/software systems, these had many Control and Status Registers (CSRs) to program. The... » read more

Network-on-Chips Enabling Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Everywhere

By Frank Schirrmeister - 28 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

Recently, I attended the AI HW Summit in Santa Clara and Autosens in Brussels. Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) were critical themes for both events, albeit from different angles. While AI/ML as a buzzword is very popular these days in all its good and bad ways, in discussions with customers and prospects, it became clear that we need to be precise in defining what type of A... » read more

Design Complexity In The Golden Age Of Semiconductors

By Frank Schirrmeister - 24 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

While writing last month's blog that used some of the trend charts we have seen, I noticed that a lot of the data ends in 2020 or earlier, but I was too close to the deadline to sit down and make orderly updates to some of the charts. Working day-to-day in the area of SoC integration and networks-on-chips (NoCs), the classic chart based on Karl Rupp's now 50 years of processor data that overlay... » read more

DAC 2023: Megatrends And The Road Ahead For Design Automation

By Frank Schirrmeister - 27 Jul, 2023 - Comments: 0

As Silicon Valley is in the midst of the heat wave the world is experiencing, the recent Design Automation Conference and its exhibition discussed hot technologies. Three megatrends defined the current situation – artificial intelligence (AI), chiplets, and integration. To me, the more exciting aspect of DAC was the discussion of what is ahead for EDA in the decade to come, and for that, the ... » read more

The Design Automation Conference Turns 60! What’s Hot? What’s Next?

By Frank Schirrmeister - 06 Jul, 2023 - Comments: 0

This coming week from July 9th to July 13th, experts from all over the world will descend on the Moscone Center in San Francisco to discuss aspects of what we call "Electronic Design Automation" (EDA) and typically associate with hardware development. There will be many celebratory elements this year, given the milestone of 60 years. Industry luminary Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli will give o... » read more

How Many Senses Do You Need To Drive A Car?

By Frank Schirrmeister - 01 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

The recent AutoSens conference in Detroit left me questioning whether I should turn in my driver's license. The answer the attending OEMs gave to all the discussions about the advantages of RGB cameras, ultrasound, radar, lidar, and thermal sensors was a unanimous "We probably need all of them in some form of combination" to make autonomy a reality in automotive. Together, these sensors are muc... » read more

How Safe Is Safe Enough?

By Frank Schirrmeister - 04 May, 2023 - Comments: 1

That was the overarching question a group of 180 experts discussed last week at the ISO 26262 & SOTIF conference for four days during #FuSaWeek2023 in Berlin. "How Safe is Safe Enough" is also the title of Prof. Koopman's book from September 2022. I mentioned him in my blog "Are We Too Hard On Artificial Intelligence For Autonomous Driving?" Prof. Koopman was referenced often in Berlin, and... » read more

The Architect’s Dilemma And Closing The Loop With Implementation

By Frank Schirrmeister - 06 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 0

Gordon Moore has left a mark on our industry. Moore's Law has shaped decades of development. The EDA industry has been moving up the layers of abstraction to increase the productivity and predictability of design flows in our efforts to address the ever-increasing complexity of semiconductors and electronics developments. I had written about it in "Chasing The Next Level Of Productivity" not lo... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

Key Technologies To Extend EUV To 14 Angstroms

Alongside high-NA EUV will be better-performing photoresists, reduced roughness using passivation and etch, and lateral etching to reduce tip-to-tip dimensions.

by Laura Peters

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.

by Bryon Moyer

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