Alternative To x86, ARM Architectures?


Software developed by professors and graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley? That will never fly in the semiconductor industry, right? Maybe they said that about SPICE, four decades ago. The jury is still out on RISC-V (pronounced risk-five) the modular, open-source instruction set architecture created in this decade by Cal professors and students, yet the ISA is gai... » read more

DAC Day Two: Down To Business


DAC day two started with a breakfast presentation put on by Synopsys which included guests from ARM, TSMC and HiSilicon. It was titled Collaborating to Enable Design with the latest processors and finFET processes. Collaboration is a word that we hear increasingly when talking about the advanced nodes and today we are truly at the point where one company cannot do it all. Ron Moore, VP of ma... » read more

Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan


Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence, opens up on the next big things, what will drive them, and what will change to make that happen. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the biggest changes in the semiconductor industry over the past year? Tan: The whole system approach to designing hardware and software is really happening now. It will continue to expand fr... » read more

DAC Day One: EDA Through Different Glasses


DAC is back in Austin after being away for three years. The weather improved for our arrival after the bad thunderstorms of the past couple of weeks. The sun came out and started to heat everything up. With water still pooling around the place, it was somewhat humorous to see a bus pass with the slogan "Think about Austin without water." DAC starts, as it always has in my memory, with a pres... » read more

Cooperation Instead Of Competition


I spent more than 20 years working in EDA and managed to do so without ever working for one of the big three. Big EDA companies were always the competition. Oh sure, you’d partner with them strategically if you could, but always keeping in mind that little fish swimming with big fish often end up being eaten. That all changed seven months ago when ARM acquired Carbon’s technology and tea... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics uncorked the latest version of its Catapult high-level synthesis platform, adding a formal-based C Property Checker tool to automatically identify and formally prove hard-to-find issues like uninitialized memory, divide by 0, and array bounds errors in the users' HLS C++/SystemC model. IP ARM unveiled the Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 processors. According to ARM, the g... » read more

Open Standards For Verification?


The increasing use of verification data for analyzing and testing complex designs is raising the stakes for more standardized or interoperable database formats. While interoperability between databases in chip design is not a new idea, it has a renewed sense of urgency. It takes more time and money to verify increasingly complex chips, and more of that data needs to be used earlier in the fl... » read more

Blog Review: June 1


You have probably heard a lot about Portable Stimulus recently. Mentor's Tom Fitzpatrick talks about one proposal that the standards group is considering and the overlap between it and the second proposal. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at 3D Xpoint and where it fits in the memory hierarchy. Synopsys' Anand Shirahatti, Mohd Adil Khan, and Jamshed Alum introduce scaled flow control c... » read more

System Bits: May 31


In automaton we trust? It is widely believed that there are two kinds of robots: friendly and helpful; or sinister and deadly. But do humans place too much trust in robots? According to the work of Harvard University senior Serena Booth, a computer science concentrator at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the answer is as complex and multifaceted as robots themsel... » read more

Preparations for DAC


The 53rd DAC is just days away now and the program is pretty well established at this point. It is returning to Austin after a couple of years in San Francisco. In 2013 it was held in this location for the first time and there was a herculean effort to bring the local design community to the event. They did amazing well and while attendance fell slightly compared to the previous year in San Die... » read more

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