Blog Review: May 7


Cadence’s Mayank Bhatnagar examines the challenge of ensuring the functional safety of disaggregated designs and how UCIe can serve as a certified way to connect individual components. Siemens’ Charlie Olson explores the causes of inter-domain leakage when a DC path is formed between two power rails and how to overcome the limitations of traditional electrical rule checking. Synopsys�... » read more

From Tool Agents To Flow Agents


Experts At The Table: AI is starting to impact several parts of the EDA design and verification flows, but so far these improvements are isolated to single tool or small flows provided by a single company. What is required is a digital twin of the development process itself on which AI can operate. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts to discuss these issues and others, in... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 30


Cadence’s Sree Parvathy points out how electrothermal analysis can help designers understand how temperature changes affect device behavior, such as mobility, threshold voltage, and saturation to mitigate potential failures due to thermal overstress. In a podcast, Siemens’ Conor Peick, Dale Tutt, and Mike Ellow chat about the transition towards software-defined products and why companies... » read more

How To Optimize Silicon Utilization To Improve PPA


In the semiconductor industry, optimizing Power, Performance, and Area (PPA) is a key challenge for designers and architects. Balancing these three factors often involves making trade-offs. Improving one variable might lead to sacrificing others. For example, boosting performance may result in increased power consumption and a larger silicon area, or some power-reducing techniques might reduce ... » read more

Data Movement Is the Energy Bottleneck of Today’s SoCs


In today’s AI-focused semiconductor landscape, raw compute performance alone no longer defines the effectiveness of a system-on-chip (SoC). The efficiency of data movement across the chip has become just as important. Whether designed for data centers or edge AI devices, SoCs must now prioritize data transport as a core architectural consideration. Moving data efficiently across the silicon f... » read more

Tape-Out Failures Are The Tip Of The Iceberg


The headline numbers for the new Wilson Research/Siemens functional verification survey are out, and it shows a dramatic decline in the number of designs that are functionally correct and manufacturable. In the past year, that has dropped from 24% to just 14%. Along with that, there is a dramatic increase in the number of designs that are behind schedule, increasing from 67% to 75%. Over the ne... » read more

AI Drives Re-Engineering Of Nearly Everything In Chips


AI's ability to mine patterns across massive quantities of data is causing fundamental changes in how chips are used, how they are designed, and how they are packaged and built. These shifts are especially apparent in high-performance AI architectures being used inside of large data centers, where chiplets are being deployed to process, move, and store massive amounts of data. But they also ... » read more

AI-Driven Verification Regression Management


By Paul Carzola and Taruna Reddy Coping with the endless growth in chip size and complexity requires innovative electronic design automation (EDA) solutions at every stage of the development process. Better algorithms, increased parallelism, higher levels of abstraction, execution on graphics processing units (GPUs), and use of AI and machine learning (ML) all contribute to these solutions. ... » read more

Reap Rewards With Shift-Left Pattern Matching For Custom And AMS Designs


To keep up with the growing complexities of IC design, major semiconductor companies are adopting shift-left strategies. For verification, this means pulling much of the work into the physical design stage. By moving critical checks earlier in the design cycle, you can identify and resolve issues before they escalate, streamlining the overall development process. The Calibre tools have been ... » read more

New Ways To Improve EDA Productivity


EDA vendors are taking aim at new ways to improve the productivity of design and verification engineers, who are struggling to keep pace with exponential increases in chip complexity in tight time-to-market windows and with constrained engineering talent pipelines. In the past, progress often was as straightforward as improving algorithms or parallelizing computations in a linear flow. But w... » read more

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