Reactionary Or Anticipatory?


The EDA industry is located at an interesting place, where anticipation and reaction come together. Too much of either one is wasteful, but too little leaves the industry having to deal with unwanted problems. We see this happening in several areas today, and the balance is changing for several reasons. We normally expect universities to be 100% anticipatory. There is no point in them worki... » read more

Startup Funding: Q3 2024


Numerous new companies burst on the scene in the third quarter of 2024, including startups with plans for customizable RISC-V-based IP for applications from microcontrollers to data centers, high-speed data center interconnects, compute-in-memory LLM inference chips, and surveillance camera SoCs. Although it did not report funding, AheadComputing also launched last quarter to develop RISC-V cor... » read more

UMI: Extending Chiplet Interconnect Standards To Deal With The Memory Wall


With the Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit upon us, it’s an appropriate time to talk about chiplet interconnect (in fact the 2024 OCP Summit has a whole day dedicated to the multi-die topic, on October 17). Of particular interest is the Bunch of Wires (BoW) interconnect specification that continues to evolve. At OCP there will be an update and working group looking at version 2.1 of BoW. (... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 9


Siemens’ Stephen Chavez looks at the key benefits and challenges to achieving a successful ECAD-MCAD collaboration. Cadence’s Nayan Gaywala shares the AXI4 locking mechanism when implementing an Xtensa LX-based multi-core system on a Xilinx FPGA platform, using a dual-core design mapped to a KC705 platform as an example. Synopsys’ Vincent van der Leest digs into SRAM PUFs and their ... » read more

EDA And IP Revenue Grow, But Markets Are Shifting


EDA and IP revenue grew 18.2% worldwide to $4.69 billion in Q2, year-over-year, with all product categories and regions reporting increases, but a drill down into the numbers shows some new pockets of growth and weakness The Asia/Pacific region exhibited strong growth once again, but the dynamics in that market have changed significantly. China is no longer the primary revenue generator for ... » read more

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era


The widespread adoption of chiplets in domain-specific applications is creating a partitioning challenge that is much more complex than anything chip design teams have dealt with in previous designs. Nearly all the major systems companies, packaging houses, IDMs, and foundries have focused on chiplets as the best path forward to improve performance and reduce power. Signal paths can be short... » read more

Working With Chiplets


The usual method of migrating to the next process node to cram more features onto a piece of silicon no longer works. It's too expensive, and too limited for most applications. The path forward is now heterogeneous chiplets targeted at specific markets, and while logic will continue to scale, other features are being separated out into chiplets developed using different process technologies. Th... » read more

Data Routing In Heterogeneous Chip Designs


Ensuring data gets to where it's supposed to go at exactly the right time is a growing challenge for design engineers and architects developing heterogeneous systems. There is more data moving around these chips with dozens of targets, which makes routing signals much more complicated. Ronen Perets, senior product marketing manager at Cadence Design Systems, talks about some of the new problems... » read more

Corner-Case Bug Hunting for RISC-V


By Ashish Darbari and Ia Tsomaia RISC-V continues to make headlines worldwide, but verification continues to be challenging. The findings of the Wilson Research Report, 2022 (see figure 1) make the trends in verification clear. We presented these in a keynote talk titled, "Future is Formal," at the recent DVCon India event. One thing is quite apparent: whether you are using directed tests... » read more

Barriers To Chiplet Sockets


Experts At The Table: Demand for chiplets is growing, but debate continues about whether standards and general-purpose chiplets will kick-start the commercialization boom, or whether success will come through customization of those chiplets. Semiconductor Engineeering sat down to discuss these and other related issues with Elad Alon, CEO of Blue Cheetah; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technol... » read more

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