Blog Review: Nov. 23


Mentor's Brian Derrick argues that both designers and ecosystems are changing to leverage advances in sensing technology at the edge of the IoT. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on a DVCon Europe keynote by NXP's Jürgen Weyer on what automotive is learning from mobile and where the big challenges lie. Synopsys' Tumuluri SantoshaLakshmi talks about seven of the biggest challenges in JED... » read more

Where Is The New Competition?


Consolidation is a regular topic of discussion at semiconductor industry conferences and trade shows. Anyone who has been to these gatherings over the past couple decades can see there are fewer companies presenting and exhibiting, fewer startups taking the place of those that were bought, and a dramatic increase in one-day, one-vendor-sponsored events where top experts are gathered to talk abo... » read more

And The Award Goes To…


I like to look at what users find the most interesting topics, not because it directly influences what I write, but to get a sense of the subjects that are on most people's minds. Some of it comes as no surprise. Content about new fabrication technologies tends to blow everything else away. While it directly affects very few of us, I think we all want to know the general direction of the indust... » read more

Verification Specialists And Generalists


Step into any weekly status update meeting where the topic is chip design verification, especially if formal verification is on the agenda, and it’s clear the verification department is moving much like traditional corporate environments. That is, there are generalists with loads of knowledge about many different verification tools and techniques and then there are specialists or experts who ... » read more

Avoiding The Barriers For Multi-Board Systems Design Development


Designing electronic systems that comprise multiple interacting boards, connectors and cables requires a multi-discipline team collaboration to effectively manage design complexity for optimum product performance and reliability. Multi-board systems may comprise two boards or up to hundreds of boards, packing a cabinet or rack, with interconnected connectors and/or cables. Since the hardware fu... » read more

What “Hamilton – An American Musical” Tickets And Emulation Have In Common


During a recent trip to New York, I managed to see “Hamilton, An American Musical”—despite the running joke about how hard it is to get tickets. The sale of “Hamilton” tickets teaches an interesting lesson about what I would call an “automatic feedback loop of value adjustment”. And believe it or not, it bears some resemblance to how verification users actually choose what engine ... » read more

Homogeneous And Heterogeneous Computing Collide


Eleven years ago processors stopped scaling due to diminishing returns and the breakdown of [getkc id="213" kc_name="Dennard's Law"]. That set in motion a chain of events from which the industry has still not fully recovered. The transition to homogeneous multi-core processing presented the software side with a problem that they did not know how to solve, namely how to optimize the usage of ... » read more

The Limits Of Parallelism


Parallelism used to be the domain of supercomputers working on weather simulations or plutonium decay. It is now part of the architecture of most SoCs. But just how efficient, effective and widespread has parallelism really become? There is no simple answer to that question. Even for a dual-core implementation of a processor on a chip, results can vary greatly by software application, operat... » read more

An Easier Path To Faster C With FPGAs


For most scientists, what is inside a high-performance computing platform is a mystery. All they usually want to know is that a platform will run an advanced algorithm thrown at it. What happens when a subject matter expert creates a powerful model for an algorithm that in turn automatically generates C code that runs too slowly? FPGA experts have created an answer. More and more, the genera... » read more

Formal’s Roadmap


Formal verification has come a long way in the past five years as it focused on narrow tasks within the verification flow. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss that progress, and the future of formal technologies, with [getperson id="11306" comment="Raik Brinkmann"], president and CEO of [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solutions"]; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at [g... » read more

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