Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools Imperas and Valtrix inked a multi-year distribution and support agreement that makes Imperas simulation technology and RISC-V reference models available pre-integrated within Valtrix STING for RISC-V processor verification. The combined solution covers the full RISC-V specification for user, privilege, and debug modes, including all ratified standard extensions, and the near ratified (st... » read more

Blog Review: June 30


Siemens EDA's Chris Spear considers what classes should represent in SystemVerilog and offers two major categories along with some helpful UVM tips. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on keynotes at the recent TSMC Technology Symposium, including TSMC CEO C. C. Wei's introduction some of the fab's new offerings, such as an automotive-focused N5 process. Synopsys' Dennis Kengo Oka notes th... » read more

Debug: The Schedule Killer


Debug often has been labeled the curse of management and schedules. It is considered unpredictable and often can happen close to the end of the development cycle, or even after – leading to frantic attempts at work-arounds. And the problem is growing. "Historically, about 40% of time is spent in debug, and that aspect is becoming more complex," says Vijay Chobisa, director of product manag... » read more

Data Centers On Wheels


Automotive architectures are evolving quickly from domain-based to zonal, leveraging the same kind of high-performance computing now found in data centers to make split-second decisions on the road. This is the third major shift in automotive architectures in the past five years, and it's one that centralizes processing using 7nm and 5nm technology, specialized accelerators, high-speed memor... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys will acquire the semiconductor and flat panel display solutions of BISTel. The acquisition will add an integrated and comprehensive yield management and prediction solution for manufacturing quality and efficiency. BISTel provides engineering equipment systems and AI applications for smart manufacturing in a range of industries. "Combining Synopsys' and BISTel's expertise in fab soluti... » read more

Rocky Road To Designing Chips In The Cloud


EDA is moving to the cloud in fits and starts as tool vendors sort out complex financial models and tradeoffs while recognizing a potentially big new opportunity to provide unlimited processing capacity using a pay-as-you-go approach. By all accounts, a tremendous amount of tire-kicking is happening now as EDA vendors and users delve into the how and why of moving to the cloud for chip desig... » read more

Pitching To Your Audience


One of the most time-consuming parts of being a journalist is listening to enough people to get all sides of a story. Writing the story is often the easy part. What makes listening more difficult is that there are detail people and concept people, but few that sit in the middle. Some people love to get down into the details about the latest feature they have just implemented in a tool, or wh... » read more

Shifting Left: Early Multi Physics Analysis For STCO


With the economics of transistor scaling no longer universally applicable, the industry is turning to innovative packaging technologies to support system scaling demands and achieve lower system cost. This has led to the emergence of a system technology co-optimization (STCO) approach, in which an SoC is disaggregated into smaller modules (also known as chiplets) that can be asynchronously desi... » read more

Architectural Considerations For AI


Custom chips, labeled as artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML), are appearing on a weekly basis, each claiming to be 10X faster than existing devices or consume 1/10 the power. Whether that is enough to dethrone existing architectures, such as GPUs and FPGAs, or whether they will survive alongside those architectures isn't clear yet. The problem, or the opportunity, is that t... » read more

Early Simulation Of Multi-Cycle Paths And False Paths


Designing with synchronous clocks avoids metastability issues on clock domain crossings, but it presents its own challenges when multi-cycle and false paths are involved. A multi-cycle path (MCP) occurs when a logical function requires more than one clock cycle to produce a final, stable result. The designer must ensure that the destination register does not clock until the result is ready. Thi... » read more

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