A New Dimension Of Complexity For IC Design


Full 3D designs involving logic-on-logic are still in the tire-kicking stage, but gaps in the tooling already are showing up. This is especially evident with static timing analysis (STA), which is used to validate a design’s timing performance by checking all possible paths for timing violations. STA issues began popping up particularly with the introduction of hybrid bonding, a bumpless p... » read more

Growth Spurred By Negatives


The success and health of the semiconductor industry is driven by the insatiable appetite for increasingly complex devices that impact every aspect of our lives. The number of design starts for the chips used in those devices drives the EDA industry. But at no point in history have there been as many market segments driving innovation as there are today. Moreover, there is no indication this... » read more

Greener Design Verification


Chip designs are optimized for lower cost, better performance, or lower power. The same cannot be said about verification, where today very little effort is spent on reducing execution cost, run time, or power consumption. Admittedly, one is a per unit cost while the other is a development cost, but could the industry be doing more to make development greener? It can take days for regression... » read more

Setting Ground Rules For 3D-IC Designs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

Domain-Specific Design Drives EDA Changes


The chip design ecosystem is beginning to pivot toward domain-specific architectures, setting off a scramble among tools vendors to simplify and optimize existing tools and methodologies. The move reflects a sharp slowdown in Moore's Law scaling as the best approach for improving performance and reducing power. In its place, chipmakers — which now includes systems companies — are pushing... » read more

Industry Transforming In Ways Previously Unimaginable


Early in the year, everyone expected that the availability of COVID vaccines would signal the start of a return to normal, but that has certainly not been the case. Now the industry is taking a longer-term view about how to transform business, what is necessary for people to maintain their mental health, and how to create robust hybrid work environments for the future that do not discard the po... » read more

Reliability Concerns Shift Left Into Chip Design


Demand for lower defect rates and higher yields is increasing, in part because chips are now being used for safety- and mission-critical applications, and in part because it's a way of offsetting rising design and manufacturing costs. What's changed is the new emphasis on solving these problems in the initial design. In the past, defectivity and yield were considered problems for the fab. Re... » read more

The High But Often Unnecessary Cost Of Coherence


Cache coherency, a common technique for improving performance in chips, is becoming less useful as general-purpose processors are supplemented with, and sometimes supplanted by, highly specialized accelerators and other processing elements. While cache coherency won't disappear anytime soon, it is increasingly being viewed as a luxury necessary to preserve a long-standing programming paradig... » read more

Challenges With Stacking Memory On Logic


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

Missing Interposer Abstractions And Standards


The design and analysis of an SoC based on an interposer is not for the faint of heart today, but the industry is aware of the challenges and is attempting to solve them. Until that happens, however, it will be a technique that only large companies can deploy because they need to treat everything almost as if it were a single die. The construction of large systems uses techniques, such as ab... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →