How 6G Research Will Revolutionize Mobile Experiences


By 2030, 6G is expected to be commercially available, revolutionizing connectivity with lightning-fast speeds, unprecedented bandwidths, and ultra-low latencies. It will transform various sectors, including telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and entertainment. In this article, get a glimpse of the 6G world coming to us over the next decade, and explore the 6G rese... » read more

Automotive Semiconductor March Madness 2024


As the US is amid "Basketball March Madness" – hard to ignore when you live in Silicon Valley – it also felt like the month of "Automotive Madness." We saw numerous announcements and events across the design chain, from semiconductor IP to software and IP providers to automotive OEMs. And in all of them, data-transport architectures, and with that networks-on-chips (NoCs), are critical. Ma... » read more

Staying Within The Margins


Last March I wrote an article called Squeezing the Margins that’s about a design that used an adaptive clocking scheme to keep the performance of a system high while simultaneously keeping the temperature below a specified maximum. Last August we looked at Managing Voltage Variation and how an adaptive clocking scheme could be used to manage dynamic voltage drop to maximize system performance... » read more

Rapid Timing Constraints Signoff With Automated Constraint Management


Signoff of a system on chip (SoC) or IP design has multiple aspects, but often timing closure is the most challenging. Early use of a static timing analysis (STA) tool is clearly important, and such a tool must be tied closely into the logic synthesis process to make it more likely that the generated gate-level netlist will meet the desired timing. Power, performance, and area (PPA) goals can o... » read more

A New Strategy For Successful Block/Chip Design-Stage Verification


Achieving efficiency in integrated circuit (IC) design while maintaining design quality is not just a goal, but a necessity. Designers constantly strive to strike a balance between ever-tightening time-to-market constraints and the finite resources at their disposal, while ensuring the quality of their designs remains uncompromised. Traditionally, IC design flows have been depicted as a linear ... » read more

Data Acquisition Software: The Brains Behind The Hardware


We have previously talked about how data acquisition systems streamline the testing of various test scenarios. However, the data acquisition (DAQ) hardware is just one-half of the equation. To make the hardware useful for various test scenarios, you need suitable data acquisition software and firmware that can take advantage of that powerful hardware and bridge the gap between your needs and... » read more

Jumpstarting The Automotive Chiplet Ecosystem


The automotive industry stands on the cusp of a technological renaissance, ushering in an era where vehicles aren't just tools of transportation, but interconnected nodes within a vast network of software-defined mobility. Central to this transformation is the concept of chiplets—miniaturized, modular components that can be mixed, matched, and scaled to create powerful, application-specific i... » read more

Brain-Inspired, Silicon Optimized


The 2024 International Solid State Circuits Conference was held this week in San Francisco. Submissions were up 40% and contributed to the quality of the papers accepted and the presentations given at the conference. The mood about the future of semiconductor technology was decidedly upbeat with predictions of a $1 trillion industry by 2030 and many expecting that the soaring demand for AI e... » read more

What’s Next For Power Electronics? Beyond Silicon


For more than half a century, silicon has been the bedrock of power electronics. Yet as silicon meets its physical limitations in higher-power, higher-temperature applications, the industry’s relentless pursuit of more efficient power systems has ushered in the wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors era. The global WBG semiconductors market reached $1.6 billion in 2022, with an estimated CAGR of ... » read more

NoC Development – Make Or Buy?


In the selection and qualification process for semiconductor IP, design teams often consider the cost of in-house development. Network-on-Chip (NoC) IP is no different. In “When Does My SoC Design Need A NoC?” Michael Frank and I argued that most of today’s designs – even less complex ones – can benefit from NoCs. In the blog “Balancing Memory And Coherence: Navigating Modern Chip A... » read more

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