The Other Side Of Makimoto’s Wave


Custom hardware is undergoing a huge resurgence across a variety of new applications, pushing the semiconductor industry to the other side of Makimoto's Wave. Tsugio Makimoto, the technologist who identified the chip industry’s 10-year cyclical swings between standardization and customization, predicted there always will be room in ASICs for general-purpose processors. But it's becoming mo... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 6


Synopsys' Snigdha Dua traces the evolution of memory from SDRAM to DDR5 and the techniques that provide each generation's speed increase. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into the challenges of 112Gbps SerDes, including what makes PAM4 signaling different from NRZ and what goes into equalization and modeling. Mentor's Rich Edelman provides a quick tutorial on how to set up a custom UVM report... » read more

New Design Approaches At 7/5nm


The race to build chips with a multitude of different processing elements and memories is making it more difficult to design, verify and test these devices, particularly when AI and leading-edge manufacturing processes are involved. There are two fundamental problems. First, there are much tighter tolerances for all of the components in those designs due to proximity effects. Second, as a re... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP OneSpin Solutions debuted the Hardware Metric Calculation (HMC) App, which uses automatically extracted design information to calculate key hardware metrics to comply with functional safety standards. In particular, it focuses on automotive and autonomous driving SoCs needing to meet the highest functional safety requirements defined by the ISO 26262 standard. The HMC App calcul... » read more

Crisis In Data


The push toward data-driven design, debug, manufacturing and reliability holds huge promise, but the big risk is none of this will happen in an organized fashion and everyone will be frustrated. One of the clear messages coming out of DVCon this week is that standards need to be established for data. Even within large chipmakers and systems companies, the data they extract from tools is not ... » read more

Follow The Data


What does antitrust mean in the age of data? Data is in many cases gathered for free and has huge value to those who can turn that data into information and make decisions based on it. Amazon has become an example in retail because they see more sales data than any other retailer – not just what they sell, but what others choose to sell on their platform. Amazon gets to see all the data an... » read more

The Time Is Now For A Common Model Interface


By Ahmed Ramadan and Greg Curtis Driven by consumer demand for “cheaper, faster, and better,” the semiconductor industry is continually pushing the migration to smaller process geometries. This continued scaling of complex designs into advanced process nodes is critical for applications ranging from high-performance computing to low-power mobile devices. In the past, products like sma... » read more

Accelerate SSD Software Development And System Validation


The amount of data coming at us or that we produce ourselves in our daily lives continues to grow exponentially. It’s become the norm to stream movies and TV series from Netflix, as well as upload our own videos on YouTube. On top of this, a major shift in automotive (ADAS, autonomous driving) and surveillance are boosting the amount of data exchange that is happening every second. With th... » read more

Hot Technologies In Cold Weather


It is a busy week for verification and software development. DVCon in San Jose; Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany; and Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain are all happening at the same time. I ended up covering embedded software in Germany (as I also had a paper on “Shift Left” here). At chilly minus 1° Celsius in the morning, the technologies had to be pretty hot to warm me... » read more

Formal Verification Of RISC-V Cores


RISC-V is hot and stands at the beginning of what may be a major shift in the industry. Even a cursory review of upcoming conferences programs and recent technical articles makes that clear. While it is still early in the evolution of the processor architecture, there is certainly the potential that RISC-V will be a game-changer in the IP and semiconductor industry. As “a free and open ISA en... » read more

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