Allegro X AI for Generative System Design


PCB design is the act of realizing a schematic into a physical form. Currently, human designers use electronic design automation (EDA) software to combine component placement and routing to realize the electrical connectivity on a manufacturable PCB. Computer-aided design (CAD) tools have been used in the design flow since the 1970s and are now an essential part of the designer’s toolkit. Som... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 19


Cadence's Neelabh Singh explains the defined port operations of USB4 that are used to bring transmitters burst and receivers of a design under test into compliance mode and to execute tests like bit error tests, error rate tests, clock switch tests, TxFFE equalization tests, and electrical idle tests. Siemens EDA's Stephen V. Chavez examines the use of blind and buried vias in high-density i... » read more

Optimizing Data Movement In SoCs And Advanced Packages


The amount of data that needs to move around a chip is growing exponentially, driven by the rollout of AI and more sensors everywhere. There may be hundreds of IP blocks, more compute elements, and many more wires to contend with. Andy Nightingale, vice president of product management and marketing at Arteris, talks about the demand for low-latency on-chip communication in increasingly complex ... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 12


Cadence's P. Saisrinivas explains the relationship between drive strength and cell delay and why it is key to choose the appropriate drive strength to meet timing constraints while minimizing power and area. Siemens' Daniel Berger and Dirk Hartmann tackle the readout problem of accurately measuring the state of a quantum system after it has undergone a quantum computation, which becomes incr... » read more

Scenario Coverage In Formal Verification


A rapid increase in complexity with heterogeneous assemblies and advanced-node chips is raising all sorts of questions on the formal verification side about the completeness of coverage. Engineers may assume proofs are complete, but in many cases they're black boxes that provide little or no insights into what's actually being proven. This is where scenario coverage comes into play. Ashish Darb... » read more

Verification Experts Vs. Generalists


Experts At The Table: As chips and systems become more complicated, more verification tasks get abstracted. So do we need more specialists who are experts in specific tasks, or do we need more generalists who know how to use the tools but don't necessarily have the depth of understanding? Or do we need some way to balance both? Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, includi... » read more

The Price Of Fear


In my last blog, I talked about how pain is important when making predictions in the semiconductor industry. Pain is related to time to market and risk, and the flip side of risk is fear. Fear is one of the main drivers for a large number of EDA tools, such as those related to verification. The fear is taping out a chip, then waiting for what seems like an eternity to get the first chips bac... » read more

Simplifying HW/SW Co-Verification With PSS Led UVM And C Tests


By Todd Burkholder, Wael Abdelaziz Mahmoud, Tom Fitzpatrick, Vishal Baskar, and Mohamed Nafea The complexity of system on chips (SoCs) continues to grow rapidly with the integration of more functionality onto a single chip. As a result, traditional verification methodologies struggle to keep pace with the growing complexities, leading to longer development cycles and increased risk of design... » read more

Improving Verification Methodologies


Methodology improvements and automation are becoming pivotal for keeping pace with the growing complexity and breadth of the tasks assigned to verification teams, helping to compensate for lagging speed improvements in the tools. The problem with the tools is that many of them still run on single processor cores. Functional simulation, for example, cannot make use of an unlimited number of c... » read more

AI’s Rapid Growth: The Crucial Role Of High Bandwidth Memory


System efficiency is dictated by the performance of crucial components. For AI hardware systems, memory subsystem performance is the single most crucial component. In this blog post, we will provide an overview of the AI model landscape and the impact of HBM memory subsystems on effective system performance. AI models have grown from a few billions of parameters from the early '90s to today�... » read more

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