The Week In Review: Design


M&A Lattice Semiconductor is set for a buyout by private equity fund Canyon Bridge at a price of $1.3 billion, or $8.30 per share. Lattice will operate as a standalone subsidiary and does not expect any changes in operations or management. The deal is expected to close in early 2017. Earlier this week, Lattice announced a low power, small form factor FPGA for 5G SERDES applications. The ... » read more

Moore’s Law Debate Continues


Does shrinking devices still make sense from a cost and performance perspective? The answer isn’t so simple anymore. Still, the discussion as to whether semiconductors are still on track with [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] occurs on a frequent enough basis to continue analyzing at least some of the dynamics at play. There is much speculation about what happens after 7nm, as well as ... » read more

Tech Talk: Earlier Software


Malte Doerper, senior manager of product management at Synopsys, talks about the big "shift left" for software, where the problems crop up, and how to save as much as a year of development time with automation and better methodologies.   Related Stories Bridging Hardware And Software The need for concurrent hardware-software design and verification is increasing, but are engine... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 2


Mentor's Harry Foster digs into the trends in ASIC/IC languages and libraries, in the latest installment of the Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study. High power and voltage requirements mean that the USB Type-C Port controller and Power Delivery blocks do not belong in the SoC, says Synopsys' Michael Posner. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into hypervisors and how virtualizati... » read more

Gaps In The Verification Flow


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of the functional verification flow with Stephen Bailey, director of emerging companies at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; [getperson id="11079" comment="Anupam Bakshi"], CEO of [getentity id="22168" e_name="Agnisys"]; [getperson id="11124" comment="Mike Bartley"], CEO of [getentity id="22868" e_name="Test and Verification... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 1


There is a lurking malice in cloud hosting services A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of California Santa Barbara has found — as part of a study of 20 major cloud hosting services — that as many as 10 percent of the repositories hosted by them had been compromised, with several hundred of the ‘buckets’ act... » read more

Fast, Accurate, And Standards-Based


Unlike the loosely timed models used for software development, which rely on a high level of abstraction to simulate as fast as possible, the communication between the architecture models in a virtual prototype for early performance analysis requires timing to be modeled more accurately. This tradeoff can seem like a big leap to some, spanning the gap from SystemC TLM-2.0 LT (loosely timed) ... » read more

Silicon Photonics Comes Into Focus


Silicon photonics is attracting growing attention and investment as a companion technology to copper wiring inside of data centers, raising new questions about what comes next and when. Light has always been the ultimate standard for speed. It requires less energy to move large quantities of data, generates less heat than electricity, and it can work equally well over long or short distances... » read more

The Battle To Embed The FPGA


There have been many attempts to embed an [gettech id="31071" comment="FPGA"] into chips in the past, but the market has failed to materialize—or the solutions have failed to inspire. An early example was [getentity id="22924" comment="Triscend"], founded in 1997 and acquired by [getentity id="22839" e_name="Xilinx"] in 2004. It integrated a CPU—which varied from an [getentity id="22186" co... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


IP ARM unveiled a suite of products focused on the IoT, with new processors, radio technology, subsystems, end-to-end security and a cloud-based services platform. Included are Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33, the first embedded processors based on the ARMv8-M architecture. The Cortex-M33 features configuration options including a coprocessor interface, DSP and floating point computation, while th... » read more

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