IP-XACT Is Back, For All The Right Reasons


The intent behind IP-XACT has always been to provide a bridge between system-on-chip (SoC) assembly and larger considerations. This standard has additionally been used to adapt to multi-sourced and constantly evolving intellectual property (IP) that design and product teams build, often in different companies. Moreover, it was used to interface with product development beyond the specialized ne... » read more

Challenges Of Edge AI Inference


Bringing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to your industry—whether it be medical imaging, robotics, or some other vision application entirely—has the potential to enable new functionalities and reduce the compute requirements for existing workloads. This is because a single CNN can replace more computationally expensive image processing, denoising, and object detection algorithms. Howev... » read more

New Design Approaches For Automotive


The push toward increasing autonomy in automotive is driving new approaches in electronics development. Instead of designing individual components, the focus now is on modeling in context. The ultimate goal is to create an executable specification based on industry-accepted standards, with enough flexibility to be able to customize that spec for different customers. This is a difficult engin... » read more

‘Hug The Debug’ – Before It’s Too Late


Though the term “shift-left” originated in the software industry, its importance is often cited in the hardware (semiconductor) industry where the end-product (chip) costs are skyrocketing. The increase in cost is driven by a global chip shortage, especially in the automotive industry. Manufacturing a robust chip is a long, iterative process that may require many re-spins. Shift-left refers... » read more

Making Autonomous Driver Chips Safe From The Top Down


It’s easy to think of electronics applications in which the chips must be ultra-safe: nuclear power plants, aircraft, weapons systems, and implanted medical devices. Autonomous vehicles, capable of self-driving with only the electronics in control, are rapidly emerging to join this list. These vehicles must be “safe” in all the usual colloquial ways, but they also must meet a very specifi... » read more

IoT Security: Confusing And Fragmented


Security regulations for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are evolving around the world, but there is no consistent set of requirements that can be applied globally — and there may never be. What exists today is a patchwork of certification labs and logos. That makes it difficult for IoT-device designers to know where to get their security blessed. Unlike in data centers, where there is a ... » read more

Challenges In Developing A New Inferencing Chip


Cheng Wang, co-founder and senior vice president of software and engineering at Flex Logix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to explain the process of bringing an inferencing accelerator chip to market, from bring-up, programming and partitioning to tradeoffs involving speed and customization.   SE: Edge inferencing chips are just starting to come to market. What challenges di... » read more

Securing Offload Engines For A Robust Secure SoC System


Welcome to the Securing Offload Engines blog series where we will explore different approaches to security implementations and look at system examples involving Cadence Tensilica Xtensa Processors. In this blog, we will look at why it is important to build a robust secure SoC and introduce some of the common approaches to securing the offload engines. In subsequent posts, we will look at each o... » read more

Automotive Safety Island


The promise of autonomous vehicles is driving profound changes in the design and testing of automotive semiconductor parts. Automotive ICs, once deployed for simple functions like controlling windows, are now performing complex functions related to advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving applications. The processing power required results in very large and complex ICs that ... » read more

CXL Memory Interconnect Initiative: Enabling A New Era of Data Center Architecture


In response to an exponential growth in data, the industry is on the threshold of a groundbreaking architectural shift that will fundamentally change the performance, efficiency and cost of data centers around the globe. Server architecture, which has remained largely unchanged for decades, is taking a revolutionary step forward to address the growing demand for data and the voracious performan... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →