Verification And Test Of Safety And Security


Functional verification can cost as much as design, but new capabilities are piling onto an already stressed verification methodology, leaving solutions fragmented and incomplete. In a perfect world, a semiconductor device would be verified to operate according to its complete specification, and continue to operate correctly over the course of its useful life. The reality, however, is this i... » read more

Better Choreography Required For Complex Chips


The rapidly growing number of features and options in chip design are forcing engineering teams to ratchet up their planning around who does what, when it gets done, and how various components will interact. In effect, more elements in the design flow need to be choreographed much more precisely. Some steps have to shift further left, while others need to be considered earlier in the plannin... » read more

CEO Outlook: Chiplets, Data Management, And Reliability


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about changes in chip design with Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president for IC EDA at Siemens Digital Industries Software; John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions; John Lee, general manager and vice president of Ansys' Semiconductor Business Unit; Niels Faché, vice president and general manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight; ... » read more

Software-Defined Hardware Architectures


Hardware/software co-design has been a goal for several decades, but success has been limited. More recently, progress has been made in optimizing a processor as well as the addition of accelerators for a given software workload. While those two techniques can produce incredible gains, it is not enough. With increasing demands being placed on all types of processing, single-processor solutio... » read more

Chiplet Planning Kicks Into High Gear


Chiplets are beginning to impact chip design, even though they are not yet mainstream and no commercial marketplace exists for this kind of hardened IP. There are ongoing discussions about silicon lifecycle management, the best way to characterize and connect these devices, and how to deal with such issues as uneven aging and thermal mismatch. In addition, a big effort is underway to improve... » read more

Chip Design CEO Outlook


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president for IC EDA at Siemens Digital Industries Software; John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions; John Lee, general manager and vice president of Ansys' Semiconductor Business Unit; Niels Faché, vice president and general manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight; Dean Drako, president and CEO of IC M... » read more

IP Becoming More Complex, More Costly


Success in the semiconductor intellectual property (IP) market requires more than a good bit of RTL. New advances mandate a complete design, implementation, and verification team, which limits the number of companies competing in this market. What constitutes an IP block has changed significantly since the concept was first introduced in the 1990s. What was initially just a piece of RTL (reg... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2023


Packaging was a hot spot in April, with one of the largest rounds going to a middle-end-of-line advanced packaging company. A second packaging company also drew significant funding for its focus on wafer-level packaging for CMOS image sensors. Two packaging substrate manufacturers also saw investment. Two photoresist makers also drew sizeable rounds. Both they and the packaging companies are... » read more

AI Adoption Slow For Design Tools


A lot of excitement, and a fair amount of hype, surrounds what artificial intelligence (AI) can do for the EDA industry. But many challenges must be overcome before AI can start designing, verifying, and implementing chips for us. Should AI replace the algorithms in use today, or does it have a different role to play? At the end of the day, AI is a technique that has strengths and weaknesses... » read more

EDA Makes A Frenzied Push Into Machine Learning


Machine learning is becoming a competitive prerequisite for the EDA industry. Big chipmakers are endorsing and demanding it, and most EDA companies are deploying it for one or more steps in the design flow, with plans to add much more over time. In recent weeks, the three largest EDA vendors have made sweeping announcements about incorporating ML into their tools at their respective user eve... » read more

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