category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Practical Processor Verification
By Brian Bailey - 23 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

Custom processors are making a resurgence, spurred on by the early success of the RISC-V ISA and the ecosystem that is rapidly building around it. But this shift is amid questions about whether processor verification has become a lost art. Years ago custom processors were common. But as the market consolidated around a handful of companies, so did the tools and expertise needed to develop th... » read more

Using Processor Trace At The System Level
By Ann Mutschler - 23 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

The race to process more data faster using less power is creating a series of debug challenges at the system level, where developers need to be able to trace interactions across multiple and often heterogeneous processing elements that may function independently of each other. In general, trace is a hardware debug feature that allows the run-time behavior of IP to be monitored. More specific... » read more

Re-Imagining The GPU
By Susan Rambo And Ed Sperling - 23 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

John Rayfield, CTO at Imagination Technologies, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about RISC-V, AI, and computing architectures. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What your plans are for RISC-V? Rayfield: We're actively finalizing the integration of RISC-V cores into future-generation GPUs. That work has been going on for several months. Moving forward, we'... » read more

Medical, Industrial & Aerospace IC Design Changes
By Ann Mutschler - 30 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

Medical, industrial and aerospace chips are becoming much more complex as more intelligence is added into these devices, forcing design teams to begin leveraging tools and methodologies that typically have been used only at the leading-edge nodes for commercial applications. But as with automotive, the needs of these systems are changing quickly. In addition to strict quality, safety and sec... » read more

Why It’s So Hard To Create New Processors
By Brian Bailey - 26 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 1

The introduction, and initial success, of the RISC-V processor ISA has reignited interest in the design of custom processors, but the industry is now grappling with how to verify them. The expertise and tools that were once in the market have been consolidated into the hands of the few companies that have been shipping processor chips or IP cores over the past 20 years. Verification of a pro... » read more

Software-Defined Hardware Gains Ground — Again
By Ann Mutschler - 26 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

The traditional approach of running generic software on x86-based CPUs is running out of steam for many applications due to the slowdown of Moore’s Law and the concurrent exponential growth in software application complexity and scale. In this environment, the software and hardware are disparate due the dominance of the x86 architecture. “The need for and advent of the hardware accelerat... » read more

Do You Trust Your IP Supplier?
By Brian Bailey - 26 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

How much do you trust your IP supplier, regardless of whether IP was developed in-house or by a third-party provider? And what implications does it have a system integrator? These are important questions that many companies are beginning to ask. Today, there are few methods, other than documentation, that provide the necessary information. The software industry may be ahead of the hardware i... » read more

3nm: Blurring Lines Between SoCs, PCBs And Packages
By Ann Mutschler - 02 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 5

Leading-edge chipmakers, foundries and EDA companies are pushing into 3nm and beyond, and they are encountering a long list of challenges that raise questions about whether the entire system needs to be shrunk onto a chip or into a package. For 7nm and 5nm, the problems are well understood. In fact, 5nm appears to be more of an evolution from 7nm than a major shift in direction. But at 3nm, ... » read more

An Increasingly Complicated Relationship With Memory
By Brian Bailey - 27 Feb, 2020 - Comments: 4

The relationship between a processor and its memory used to be quite simple, but in modern SoCs there are multiple heterogeneous processors and accelerators, each needing a different means of accessing memory for maximum efficiency. Compromises are being made in order to preserve the unified programming model of the past, but the pressures are increasing for some fundamental changes. It does... » read more

The Challenges Of Building Inferencing Chips
By Ann Mutschler - 27 Feb, 2020 - Comments: 0

Putting a trained algorithm to work in the field is creating a frenzy of activity across the chip world, spurring designs that range from purpose-built specialty processors and accelerators to more generalized extensions of existing and silicon-proven technologies. What's clear so far is that no single chip architecture has been deemed the go-to solution for inferencing. Machine learning is ... » read more

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