Debugging Embedded Applications


Debugging embedded designs is becoming increasingly difficult as the number of observed and possible interactions between hardware and software continue to grow, and as more features are crammed into chips, packages, and systems. But there also appear to be some advances on this front, involving a mix of techniques, including hardware trace, scan chain-based debug, along with better simulation ... » read more

What’s Missing For Designing Chips At The System Level


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about design challenges in advanced packages and nodes with John Lee, vice president and general manager for semiconductors at Ansys; Shankar Krishnamoorthy, general manager of Synopsys' Design Group; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; and Andrew Kahng, professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. This discussion was held at the Ansys IDEAS co... » read more

What’s Next For Emulation


Emulation is now the cornerstone of verification for advanced chip designs, but how emulation will evolve to meet future demands involving increasingly dense, complex, and heterogeneous architectures isn't entirely clear. EDA companies have been investing heavily in emulation, increasing capacity, boosting performance, and adding new capabilities. Now the big question is how else they can le... » read more

Partitioning For Better Performance And Power


Partitioning is becoming more critical and much more complex as design teams balance different ways to optimize performance and power, shifting their focus from a single chip to a package or system involving multiple chips with very specific tasks. Approaches to design partitioning have changed over the years, most recently because processor clock speeds have hit a wall while the amount of d... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For RISC-V


High-quality RISC-V implementations are becoming more numerous, but it is the extensibility of the architecture that is driving a lot of design activity. The challenge is designing and implementing custom processors without having to re-implement them every time at the register transfer level (RTL). There are two types of high-level synthesis (HLS) that need to be considered. The first is ge... » read more

EDA Vendors Widen Use Of AI


EDA vendors are widening the use of AI and machine learning to incorporate multiple tools, providing continuity and access to consistent data at multiple points in the semiconductor design flow. While gaps remain, early results from a number of EDA tools providers point to significant improvements in performance, power, and time to market. AI/ML has been deployed for some time in EDA. Still,... » read more

Software-Hardware Co-Design Becomes Real


For the past 20 years, the industry has sought to deploy hardware/software co-design concepts. While it is making progress, software/hardware co-design appears to have a much brighter future. In order to understand the distinction between the two approaches, it is important to define some of the basics. Hardware/software co-design is essentially a bottom-up process, where hardware is deve... » read more

Optimization Driving Changes In Microarchitectures


The semiconductor ecosystem is at a turning point for how to best architect the CPU based on the explosion of data, the increased usage of AI, and the need for differentiation and customization in leading-edge applications. In the past, much of this would have been accomplished by moving to the next process node. But with the benefits from scaling diminishing at each new node, the focus is s... » read more

Containing The Explosion In Data


The amount of data that could be kept for every design is gargantuan, but even that may not be enough these days as lifecycle management, continuous verification, regulatory requirements, and globalization add to the data that needs to be stored. But data has no value if it cannot be found or used in ways that provide more benefit than the cost of storing it. "Data management is not unique t... » read more

Building Complex Chips That Last Longer


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about design challenges in advanced packages and nodes with John Lee, vice president and general manager for semiconductors at Ansys; Shankar Krishnamoorthy, general manager of Synopsys' Design Group; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; and Andrew Kahng, professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. This discussion was held at the Ansys IDEAS co... » read more

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