category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

A Well-Engineered Leap Of Faith
By Ed Sperling - 27 Aug, 2009 - Comments: 0

The economics of engineering chips are changing again. We’ve been hearing for several process nodes about runaway non-recurring engineering costs and the rising costs of masks and how Moore’s Law would meet an abrupt end because no one could afford to stay the course. And while it’s true that not everyone did stay the course, the solution has turned out less onerous than many predi... » read more

Reflections Of A Cynic
By Ed Sperling - 31 Jul, 2009 - Comments: 0

Looking around the system-level design industry from the vantage point of DAC is like looking down on a bustling city from an airplane. It’s impossible to see all the different processes and technologies that go into creating a design from too high up, just as it’s almost impossible to see the entire system-level design from a single gate or memory subsystem or block. That’s the whol... » read more

Lots Of Work To Be Done
By Ed Sperling - 25 Jul, 2009 - Comments: 0

Many design engineers have had a long time to think about what’s changed in the design world. Some of them are still looking for jobs, frustrated by the remarkably slow pickup in the job market—particularly in the United States and Europe. But as Magma CEO Rajeev Madhavan noted last year, coming out of the downturn things may not look the same as when we went into the downturn. It’s ... » read more

DAC Attack
By Ed Sperling - 24 Jul, 2009 - Comments: 0

Designing chips has always attracted the best and the brightest minds. The sheer complexity of creating submicron technology creates challenges in mathematics, physics and science, and if intellectual stimulation ever wanes there’s always the problems associated with the next process node. Moore’s Law sees to it that new and interesting challenges always have to be met. But it does not... » read more

Where The Jobs Are
By Ed Sperling - 19 Jun, 2009 - Comments: 0

The job market for design and verification engineers seems to be exploding. In the past week, listings have been flooding onto jobs boards for LinkedIn semiconductor design groups. The only trouble is engineers may have to move to get the jobs—sometimes halfway around the globe. There have been a bunch of job postings for semiconductor expertise in India, the United Kingdom, as well as pla... » read more

Fear Of Failure
By Ed Sperling - 05 Jun, 2009 - Comments: 0

For the past five decades, failure in the semiconductor world was nothing to be ashamed of. Mistakes were a sign of experience, and even some of the most spectacular errors in judgment didn’t cost design teams their jobs or deter more experimentation.   As we move down into the realm of 45nm and beyond, that’s no longer the case. Mistakes can cause an entire project to be shut down for... » read more

EUV Is Late—And It Hurts
By Ed Sperling - 28 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

Most chip architects and engineers couldn’t give a whit about the difference between deep ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet lithography. It’s traditionally been a problem that foundries had to wrestle with, and that was their problem. Even DFM has been slow to catch on because what’s done in a foundry is of little interest up front.   The separation of those two worlds worked fine ... » read more

What Else Needs To Change
By Ed Sperling - 20 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

Rising complexity at each new node may require a different skill set for design engineers in the future. What exactly needs to be included in that skill set remains open to debate, and it probably will continue to evolve. But there are some clear trends emerging.   First of all, there’s the software. While software engineers can write code, hardware engineers who understand programming c... » read more

The Next Problem In Verification
By Ed Sperling - 14 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

Last week’s blog on OVM vs. VMM was like a match on dry timber, which is probably a bad analogy to make in California these days. Weeding through the comments—both on the record and off, and there was plenty more off the record—it appears there’s plenty of work under way to bridge the two worlds, but there’s an inverse amount of information available to the people who use one or the... » read more

VMM vs. OVM Becomes More Important
By Ed Sperling - 07 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

For all the talk about VMM vs. OVM and how it doesn’t matter…well, apparently it does.   It’s not that one verification environment is so much better than the other. That’s like saying one religion is better than another. People kill each other over those kinds of statements. And the truth is, there are plenty of people who will argue for and against each side.   Strangely, when... » read more

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