System Bits: June 14


Microlaser phase locking arrays for terahertz security scanners Researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories reminded that terahertz radiation, the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and visible light, has promising applications in security and medical diagnostics, even if such devices will require the development of compact, low-power, high-quality terahertz lasers. ... » read more

Plotting The Next Semiconductor Road Map


The semiconductor industry is retrenching around new technologies and markets as Moore's Law becomes harder to sustain and growth rates in smart phones continue to flatten. In the past, it was a sure bet that pushing to the next process node would provide improvements in power, performance and cost. But after 22nm, the economics change due to the need for multi-patterning and finFETs, and th... » read more

Spec-Driven Design


Anupam Bakshi, CEO of Agnisys, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss problems in the design flow and what needs to be fixed. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the big problems facing the industry? Bakshi: There is a disconnect from the specification down to the implementation. That's why verification has become so big. Specification down to implemen... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Mergers & Acquisitions Silvaco jumped into the IP market with its acquisition of commercialization and management company IPextreme. Founder and CEO Warren Savage will be staying on to head up the new division. Additionally, through wholly owned French subsidiary Infiniscale SA, Silvaco acquired a majority stake in edXact, which focused on parasitic reduction tools. Rambus acquired th... » read more

DAC Day Four: Excitement And Risk


One thing that was new to DAC this year, was an art exhibit. These were pieces of artwork related to our industry, such as chip plots, or more abstract ideas based on design data or analyses. They received many more entrants than their wildest dreams and had to choose a winner from over 80 pieces, but the grand prize was won by a 3D model of a finFET by David Freid of Coventor. This piece was ... » read more

System-Level Verification Tackles New Role


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advances in system-level verification with Larry Melling, product management director for the system verification group of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Larry Lapides, VP of sales for [getentity id="22036" e_name="Imperas”] and Jean-Marie Brunet, director of marketing for the emulation division of [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Gr... » read more

DAC Day Three: UVM, Machine Learning And DFT Come Together


The industry and users have a love/hate relationship with UVM. It has quickly risen to become the most used verification methodology and yet at the same time it is seen as being overly complex, unwieldy and difficult to learn. The third day of DAC gets started with breakfast with Accellera to discuss UVM and what we can expect to see in the next 5 years. The discussion was led by Tom Alsop, pri... » read more

Blog Review: June 8


Cadence's Paul McLellan presents Luc van den Hove's keynote at the imec Technology Forum, where he discusses the future of scaling beyond Moore's Law, from going 3D to envisioning new architectures Two years after Heartbleed's disclosure, Synopsys' Robert Vamosi chats with Billy Rios of embedded security company WhiteScope on the continued significance of the OpenSSL vulnerability in a new p... » read more

Formal Confusion


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the right and wrong ways to apply formal verification technology with Normando Montecillo, associate technical director at [getentity id="22649" comment="Broadcom"]; Ashish Darbari, principal engineer at [getentity id="22709" e_name="Imagination Technologies"]; Roger Sabbagh, principal engineer at Huawei; and Stuart Hoad, lead engineer at PMC Sierra... » read more

System Bits: June 7


Social robot seeks to understand pedestrian behavior In order for robots to circulate on sidewalks and mingle with humans in other crowded places, they’ll have to understand the unwritten rules of pedestrian behavior. As such, Stanford University researchers have created a short, non-humanoid prototype of just such a moving, self-navigating machine. [caption id="attachment_28082" align="ali... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →