New Challenges For Connected Vehicles


Connected vehicles are all about convenience and safety. Modern vehicles are connected to the Internet via wireless networks, consumer apps, and infotainment systems, and there is work underway to connect them over 5G to guided driving. But there also are challenges to making all of this work securely, safely, and as expected throughout the expected lifetimes of chips and systems. The goal i... » read more

Battery Management Getting Competitive For EVs


The success or failure of future electric vehicles will depend on where and how those cars are used, as well as significant advances in battery materials, energy density, and some very complex battery management systems. Battery power needs to be balanced, stored for extended times, and delivered to wherever it is needed most in real time. This is a huge challenge, and nearly everything in a... » read more

Electric Planes Taking Off


As the aeronautics industry and aviation startups design and test zero-emissions aircraft, they are solving problems beyond just adapting to fuel sources that cut greenhouse gas emissions. Problems of weight, noise, redundancy, refueling, cost, and turnaround time are being tackled one airline seat at time. Powerful tools can help aircraft designers look at the aircraft system as a whole, fe... » read more

Expedera: Custom Deep Learning Accelerators Through Soft-IP


Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have caused a massive increase in data generation — and along with it, a need to process data faster and more efficiently. Dubbed a “tsunami of data,” data centers are expected to consume about one-fifth of worldwide energy before 2030. This data explosion is driving a wave of startups looking to gain a foothold in custom accele... » read more

Slowdown, But No Correction


The market for chips will continue to grow over the next few years, but not as quickly as over the past couple years when the work-at-home market drove up demand for everything from laptops and TVs to home video equipment. Economists painted a mixed picture for the semiconductor industry at this week's SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium, projecting continue growth in all major markets, but tem... » read more

Startup Funding: March 2022


Semiconductor manufacturing, test, and inspection equipment startups did well in March. Investors funded a wide variety of equipment companies, including test equipment, materials handling, and those that make parts and components. In the manufacturing space, several companies developing manufacturing execution systems received funding, as well as a startup trying to prevent counterfeit parts f... » read more

EDA On Cloud Presents Unique Challenges


Discussions about cloud-based EDA tools are heating up for both hardware and software engineering projects, opening the door to vast compute resources that can be scaled up and down as needed. Still, not everyone is on board with this shift, and even companies that use the cloud don't necessarily want to use it for every aspect of chip design. But the number of cloud-based EDA tools is growi... » read more

Clocks Getting Skewed Up


At a logical level, synchronous designs are very simple and the clock just happens. But the clocking network is possibly the most complex in a chip, and it's fraught with the most problems at the physical level. To some, the clock is the AC power supply of the chip. To others, it is an analog network almost beyond analysis. Ironically, there are no languages to describe clocking, few tools t... » read more

Improving Memory Efficiency And Performance


This is the second of two parts on CXL vs. OMI. Part one can be found here. Memory pooling and sharing are gaining traction as ways of optimizing existing resources to handle increasing data volumes. Using these approaches, memory can be accessed by a number of different machines or processing elements on an as-needed basis. Two protocols, CXL and OMI, are being leveraged to simplify thes... » read more

Incremental Design Breakdown


For the past two decades, most designs have been incremental in nature. They heavily leveraged IP used in previous designs, and that IP often was developed by third parties. But there are growing problems with that methodology, especially at advanced nodes where back-end issues and the impact of 'shift left' are reducing the savings from reuse. The value of IP reuse has been well established... » read more

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