New Ways To Improve EDA Productivity


EDA vendors are taking aim at new ways to improve the productivity of design and verification engineers, who are struggling to keep pace with exponential increases in chip complexity in tight time-to-market windows and with constrained engineering talent pipelines. In the past, progress often was as straightforward as improving algorithms or parallelizing computations in a linear flow. But w... » read more

Analog Creates Ripples in Digital Verification


We live in an analog world, but analog has been minimized whenever possible. At some point digital and analog must come together in every electronic device, and that has long been an area where errors creep in. The Wilson Research Group and Siemens EDA functional verification study has long shown that analog and mixed signal are two of the highest causes of flaws that result in chip respins.... » read more

AI Agents Need Goals


Experts At The Table: Definitions and goals matter when it comes to using AI effectively, and it has to be tightly reined in to be effective. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts to discuss these issues and others, including Johannes Stahl, senior director of product line management for the Systems Design Group at Synopsys; Michael Young, director of product marketing for ... » read more

Startup Funding: Q1 2025


The first quarter of 2025 saw six companies raise at least $100 million in investment. Of those, three went to quantum hardware companies, with major investment into neutral atom, superconducting, and hybrid quantum control approaches. AI chips and enabling technology were another big winner in the quarter, with companies developing optical communications tech for chips and data center infra... » read more

Challenges In Managing Chiplet Resources


Managing chiplet resources is emerging as a significant and multi-faceted challenge as chiplets expand beyond the proprietary designs of large chipmakers and interact with other elements in a package or system. Poor resource management in chiplets adds an entirely new dimension to the usual power, performance, and area tradeoffs. It can lead to performance bottlenecks, because as chiplets co... » read more

First-Time Silicon Success Plummets


First-time silicon success is falling sharply due to rising complexity, the need for more iterations as chipmakers shift from monolithic chips to multi-die assemblies, and an increasing amount of customization that makes design and verification more time-consuming. Details from a new functional verification survey[1] highlight the growing difficulty of developing advanced chips that are both... » read more

Digital Twins For Design And Verification Workflows


Experts At The Table: AI is starting to impact several parts of the EDA design and verification flows, but so far these improvements are isolated to a single tool or small flows provided by a single company. What is required is a digital twin of the development process itself, on which AI can operate. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, including Johannes Stahl, senior d... » read more

The Evolving Role Of AI In Verification


Experts At The Table: The pressure on verification engineers to ensure the functional correctness of devices has increased exponentially as chips have gotten more complex and evolved into SoC, 3D-ICs, multi-die chiplets and beyond. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, which included Josh Rensch, director of application engineering at Arteris; Matt Graham, senior group dir... » read more

Verification Experts Vs. Generalists


Experts At The Table: As chips and systems become more complicated, more verification tasks get abstracted. So do we need more specialists who are experts in specific tasks, or do we need more generalists who know how to use the tools but don't necessarily have the depth of understanding? Or do we need some way to balance both? Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts, includi... » read more

Improving Verification Methodologies


Methodology improvements and automation are becoming pivotal for keeping pace with the growing complexity and breadth of the tasks assigned to verification teams, helping to compensate for lagging speed improvements in the tools. The problem with the tools is that many of them still run on single processor cores. Functional simulation, for example, cannot make use of an unlimited number of c... » read more

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