What Does An AI Chip Look Like?


Depending upon your point of reference, artificial intelligence will be the next big thing or it will play a major role in all of the next big things. This explains the frenzy of activity in this sector over the past 18 months. Big companies are paying billions of dollars to acquire startup companies, and even more for R&D. In addition, governments around the globe are pouring additional... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 28


Software robots have fights lasting years According to University of Oxford and Alan Turing Institute researchers, editing bots on Wikipedia undo vandalism, enforce bans, check spelling, create links and import content automatically, whereas other non-editing bots mine data, identify data or identify copyright infringements — sometimes with unpredictable consequences. The team looked at h... » read more

Embedded FPGAs Come Of Age


FPGAs increasingly are being viewed as a critical component in heterogeneous designs, ratcheting up their stature and the amount of attention being given to programmable devices. Once relegated to test chips that ultimately would be replaced by lower-power and higher-performance ASICs if volumes were sufficient, FPGAs have come a long way. Over the last 20 years programmable devices have mov... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A ARM made two acquisitions to add the new NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) low power wide area connectivity standard to its designs: Mistbase, founded in 2015 in Sweden, provides a complete NB-IoT physical layer implementation solution, while London-based NextG-Com, founded in 2008, offers a complete layer two and three software stack for NB-IoT. Tools Synopsys released the latest versio... » read more

AI Storm Brewing


AI is coming. Now what? The answer isn't clear, because after decades of research and development, AI is finally starting to become a force to reckon with. The proof is in the M&A activity underway right now. Big companies are willing to pay huge sums to get out in front of this shift. Here is a list of just some of the AI acquisitions announced or completed over the past few years: ... » read more

Could DVCon Be Better?


DVCon is undoubtedly the best conference in the industry if your interest is functional verification. In the past, it has also had a slant toward design. The focus is quite simply based on the standards activity going on within [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"], the EDA industry's body that turns problems into solution in a short space of time. As those standards mature, they are handed... » read more

Better Code With RTL Linting And CDC Verification


Automated design rule checking, or linting, has been around in RTL verification for at least a couple decades, yet still many HDL designers completely ignore this simple yet very powerful bug hunting method. Why would a busy designer need to run this annoying warning generator? The hostility against using conventional linting tools is often explained by the enormous amount of output noise, limi... » read more

IP Qualification During RTL Synthesis


By Sudhakar Jilla and Arvind Narayanan The use of IP (intellectual property) as basic building blocks is an established practice for SoC designs. Most IP is developed without chip-level context and very little knowledge about physical design, which can introduce unwanted schedule risk into the design process. Much of the risk of IP development can be mitigated by using new physical synthesis... » read more

Software Modeling And KPI


In Software Modeling Goes Mainstream, Ed Sperling recently wrote how chipmakers are applying use case modeling techniques to better understand the interactions between software and hardware and how they impact system performance and energy efficiency. As the software content for multicore SoCs grows, these interactions are becoming increasingly complex. For system designers and SoC architect... » read more

Custom Hardware Thriving


In the early days of the IoT, predictions about the commoditization of hardware and the end of customized hardware were everywhere. Several years later, those predictions are being proven wrong. Off-the-shelf components have not replaced customized hardware, and software has not dictated all designs. In fact, in many cases the exact opposite has happened. And where software does play an elev... » read more

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