Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Marvell will acquire Innovium, a provider of Ethernet data center switches, in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.1 billion. Innovium's switching architecture is optimized for ultra-low latency, optimized power, high performance, and telemetry in cloud applications and will join Marvell's portfolio of data center products to provide "architectural choice and flexibility to meet a diverse set... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 4


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as industry luminaries celebrate 50 years of the microprocessor with a discussion on major challenges to the growth of microprocessors, inflection points over the last 50 years, and predictions for the next 25. Siemens EDA's Vladimir Kirichenko warns that designing electrical and thermal systems separately may lead to various problems such as late design ch... » read more

Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry


The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools Vtool released a new version of its Cogita visual debug platform. New features aim to provide faster debug capabilities, including visual representation of test results using log files as input, improved manipulation and navigation throughout big logs, ML algorithms to classify data and find the relationship between inputs, and the ability to merge and compare test flow of two different ... » read more

Rethink, Not Replicate


We should start to call COVID the Great Disrupter. It caused many things to change, ranging from how the industry has been tackling education, to supply chains, the ability to find products in stores, and the pricing and availability of materials, workers, and office space. I can't see anyone fully trusting just-in-time supply chains anymore, even though they sometimes provided financial advant... » read more

Choosing The Right Model Fidelity For Your Digital Twin


The EDA industry has advanced by leaps and bounds with innovation. Every time we approach a new technology node, many algorithms have to be re-imagined. As the late Jim Ready often pointed out to me, compared to the world of software development, these semiconductor technology changes are the hardware equivalent to what Fred Brooks, in his seminal article “No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accid... » read more

RISC-V Verification: The 5 Levels Of Simulation-Based Processor Hardware DV


By Lee Moore and Simon Davidmann The RISC-V open standard ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) offers developers the opportunity to configure the features and functions of a custom processor to uniquely address their target end application needs and requirements. RISC-V has a modular structure with many standard instruction extensions for additional dedicated hardware features such as Floating... » read more

Robust Variation-Aware Smart Power Designs For Silicon Success


Power management ICs (PMICs) is a rapidly growing segment in the semiconductor industry. The growth has been fueled by the demand for Smart Power applications that include wearable electronics, mobile computing platforms, printers, hard disk drives (HDD), IoT devices, and the full array of automotive applications. According to a report from market research firm Coherent Market Insights, the gl... » read more

Challenges For New AI Processor Architectures


Investment money is flooding into the development of new AI processors for the data center, but the problems here are unique, the results are unpredictable, and the competition has deep pockets and very sticky products. The biggest issue may be insufficient data about the end market. When designing a new AI processor, every design team has to answer one fundamental question — how much flex... » read more

Sweeping Changes Ahead For Systems Design


Data centers are undergoing a fundamental change, shifting from standard processing models to more data-centric approaches based upon customized hardware, less movement of data, and more pooling of resources. Driven by a flood of web searches, Bitcoin mining, video streaming, data centers are in a race to provide the most efficient and fastest processing possible. But because there are so ma... » read more

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