EDA Back On Investors’ Radar


EDA is transforming from a staid but strategic sector into a hot investment market, fueled by strong earnings and growth, a clamoring for leading-edge and increasingly customized designs across new and existing markets, and the rollout of advanced technologies such as AI for a range of tools that will be needed to develop new architectures with much greater performance per watt. A confluence... » read more

IC Tool Vendors Eye Cloud-Native Future


The promise of scalability and efficiency is accelerating the migration of electronic design automation (EDA) to the cloud. Unlimited on-demand compute resources fundamentally change the chip design paradigm, where tools and workloads are no longer constrained by localized hardware. This is easier said than done, however. Optimizing existing tools and infrastructure, creating a new generatio... » read more

Shifting Left Using Model-Based Engineering


As heterogenous integration increases design complexity and forces engineers out of long-standing silos, model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is becoming essential for improving quality and reducing failures in the field. While it may seem like a new buzzword, MBSE's principles date back to the 1990s. In essence, it's a process of building models that enable early decisions, which pays off... » read more

Top Tech Videos of 2023


In 2023, heterogeneous integration, RISC-V, and advanced node logic scaling and advanced packaging dominated the semiconductor industry. All of those topics spurred deep discussions at conferences, and they were the subject of Semiconductor Engineering's most popular videos. Of the videos published in 2023, here are the highlights from our five channels: Manufacturing, Packaging & Mater... » read more

RISC-V Micro-Architectural Verification


RISC-V processors are garnering a lot of attention due to their flexibility and extensibility, but without an efficient and effective verification strategy, buggy implementations may lead to industry problems. Prior to RISC-V, processor verification almost became a lost art for most semiconductor companies. Expertise was condensed into the few commercial companies that provided processors or... » read more

Dramatic Changes Ahead For Chips And Systems


Early this year, most people had never heard of generative AI. Now the entire world is racing to capitalize on it, and that's just the beginning. New markets, such as spatial computing, quantum computing, 6G, smart infrastructure, sustainability, and many more are accelerating the need to process more data faster, more efficiently, and with much more domain specificity. Compared to the days ... » read more

2023: A Good Year For Semiconductors


Looking back, 2023 has had more than its fair share of surprises, but who were the winners and losers? The good news is that by the end of the year, almost everyone was happy. That is not how we exited 2022, where there was overcapacity, inventories had built up in many parts of the industry, and few sectors — apart from data centers — were seeing much growth. The supposed new leaders we... » read more

AI Accelerator Architectures Poised For Big Changes


AI is driving a frenzy of activity in the chip world as companies across the semiconductor ecosystem race to include AI in their product lineup. The challenge now is how to make AI run faster, use less energy, and to be able to leverage it from the edge to the data center — particularly with the rollout of large language models. On the hardware side, there are two main approaches for accel... » read more

System State Challenges Widen


Knowing the state of a system is essential for many analysis and debug tasks, but it's becoming more difficult in heterogeneous systems that are crammed with an increasing array of features. There is a limit as to how many things engineers can keep track of, and the complexity of today's systems extends far beyond that. Hierarchy and abstraction are used to help focus on the important aspect... » read more

EDA Pushes Deeper Into AI


EDA vendors are ramping up the use of AI/ML in their tools to help chipmakers and systems companies differentiate their products. In some cases, that means using AI to design AI chips, where the number and breadth of features and potential problems is exploding. What remains to be seen is how well these AI-designed chips behave over time, and where exactly AI benefits design teams. And all o... » read more

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