The Price Of Fear


In my last blog, I talked about how pain is important when making predictions in the semiconductor industry. Pain is related to time to market and risk, and the flip side of risk is fear. Fear is one of the main drivers for a large number of EDA tools, such as those related to verification. The fear is taping out a chip, then waiting for what seems like an eternity to get the first chips bac... » read more

Simplifying HW/SW Co-Verification With PSS Led UVM And C Tests


By Todd Burkholder, Wael Abdelaziz Mahmoud, Tom Fitzpatrick, Vishal Baskar, and Mohamed Nafea The complexity of system on chips (SoCs) continues to grow rapidly with the integration of more functionality onto a single chip. As a result, traditional verification methodologies struggle to keep pace with the growing complexities, leading to longer development cycles and increased risk of design... » read more

Improving Verification Methodologies


Methodology improvements and automation are becoming pivotal for keeping pace with the growing complexity and breadth of the tasks assigned to verification teams, helping to compensate for lagging speed improvements in the tools. The problem with the tools is that many of them still run on single processor cores. Functional simulation, for example, cannot make use of an unlimited number of c... » read more

AI’s Rapid Growth: The Crucial Role Of High Bandwidth Memory


System efficiency is dictated by the performance of crucial components. For AI hardware systems, memory subsystem performance is the single most crucial component. In this blog post, we will provide an overview of the AI model landscape and the impact of HBM memory subsystems on effective system performance. AI models have grown from a few billions of parameters from the early '90s to today�... » read more

Lines Blurring Between Supercomputing And HPC


Supercomputers and high-performance computers are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate due to the proliferation of AI, which is driving huge performance increases in commercial and scientific applications and raising similar challenges for both. While the goals of supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC) have always been similar — blazing fast processing — the mark... » read more

Key Challenges In Scaling AI Clusters


AI is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driving an urgent need for more powerful and efficient data centers. In response, nations and companies are ramping up investments into AI infrastructure. According to Forbes, AI spending from the Big Tech sector will exceed $250 billion in 2025, with the bulk going towards infrastructure. By 2029, global investments in AI infrastructure, including dat... » read more

Bold Prediction: 50% Of New HPC Chip Designs Will Be Multi-Die In 2025


Monolithic chips have been the workhorses behind decades of technological advancement. But just as the industrial revolution saw workhorses replaced with more efficient and powerful machinery, the semiconductor industry is on the cusp of a similar revolution. Multi-die and chiplet-based designs — which integrate multiple specialized dies in a single package or stack integrated circuits ver... » read more

Top 5 Reasons Engineers Need A Smart NoC


As system-on-chip (SoC) designs grow more complex, IP interconnect engineers struggle with achieving optimal scalability, performance, and power efficiency. The increasing number of IP blocks, often ranging from 50 to more than 500, introduces significant interconnect congestion, timing closure issues, and power dissipation challenges. Additionally, many network-on-chip (NoC) design tasks are s... » read more

Multi-Die Design Complicates Data Management


The continued unbundling of SoCs into multi-die packages is increasing the complexity of those designs and the amount of design data that needs to be managed, stored, sorted, and analyzed. Simulations and test runs are generating increasing amounts of information. That raises questions about which data needs to be saved and for how long. During the design process, engineers now must wrestle ... » read more

A Novel Approach For Hardware-Software Co-Verification


The complexity of system on chips (SoCs) continues to grow rapidly. Accordingly, new standards and methodologies are introduced to overcome these verification challenges. The Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) from Accellera is one of the standard examples used to pursue such challenges. In this paper we will show a methodology to use PSS to orchestrate the process of HW/SW co-verificati... » read more

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