Blog Review: March 8


Synopsys' Rahul Thukral and Bhavana Chaurasia find that embedded MRAM is undergoing an uplift in utilization for low-power, advanced-node SoCs thanks to its high capacity, high density, and ability to scale to lower geometries. Siemens EDA's Chris Spear dives into the UVM Factory with a look at the  SystemVerilog Object-Oriented Programming concepts behind the factory. Cadence's Veena Pa... » read more

Startup Funding: February 2023


The cost of borrowing is going up, but investors continued to pour money into the chip industry in February. Collectively, 132 companies raised more than $4.5 billion last month. One of the big beneficiaries was quantum computing, with nine companies drawing a total of more than $500 million. The bulk of that went to a quantum software and services company spun out of Alphabet, but plenty wa... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Apple plans to spend an additional €1 billion (~$1.1B) over the next six years to expand its Munich, Germany-based Silicon Design Centre, including the construction of a new research facility. "The expansion of our European Silicon Design Centre will enable an even closer collaboration between our more than 2,000 engineers in Bavaria working on breakthrough innovations, including custom sil... » read more

Blog Review: March 1


Siemens EDA's Chris Spear explains the UVM Factory and how it can facilitate collaboration by enabling injection of new features without affecting your team. Cadence's Paul McLellan looks at efforts to ensure chiplets from different companies work together, particularly when the creating companies didn't pre-plan for those specific chiplets to work together, as well as the problems of failur... » read more

How To Build Resilience Into Chips


Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for continued improvements in performance and power, but it's also contributing to unusual and often unpredictable errors in hardware that are extremely difficult to find. The sources of those errors can include anything from timing errors in a particular sequence, to gaps in bonds between chi... » read more

Keysight Acquires Cliosoft


Keysight announced today that it has acquired Cliosoft, adding IP data management and design data to its EDA portfolio. The deal comes at a time when chip designs are becoming more heterogeneous and customized, making it more difficult to keep track of a growing number of IP assets. What works for one market or sub-market may not be optimal for another. That could include everything from di... » read more

Will AI Take My Job?


Everyone is talking about ChatGPT these days, and I am sure we will be comparing it with Google's new offering before long. I thought it was time that I gave it a quick spin, and since I am preparing to moderate a webinar about chiplets as I write this, I decided it was a good example of a fairly new field and would be a good test. I started by asking, "What are semiconductor chiplets, what ... » read more

Taming Corner Explosion In Complex Chips


There is a tenuous balance between the number of corners a design team must consider, the cost of analysis, and the margins they insert to deal with them, but that tradeoff is becoming a lot more difficult. If too many corners of a chip are explored, it might never see production. If not enough corners are explored, it could reduce yield. And if too much margin is added, the device may not be c... » read more

The Vital Role Of 1.6T Networking In Emerging Technology


Although warehouses filled with acres of buzzing server racks may not seem like the most likely places to find exciting new technology, data centers play a crucial role in the emerging technologies of tomorrow. Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), metaverse, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) are all high-demand applications which rely on data centers to provide powerful ... » read more

Leveraging Chip Data To Improve Productivity


The semiconductor ecosystem is scrambling to use data more effectively in order to increase the productivity of design teams, improve yield in the fab, and ultimately increase reliability of systems in the field. Data collection, analysis, and utilization is at the center of all these efforts and more. Data can be collected at every point in the design-through-manufacturing flow and into the f... » read more

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