Keep The Wooden Horse Out Of Your Chip


The OneSpin's Holiday Puzzle tradition has reached its fourth year: hear, hear! In December 2016, OneSpin challenged engineers to solve the Einstein riddle using assertions and a formal verification tool. In December 2017, the challenge was to model the hardest Sudoku in the world using assertions and find a solution with a formal tool. The OneSpin 2018-19 Holiday Puzzle asked engineers to desi... » read more

SoC Co-Emulation Using Zynq Boards


Have you ever worked on a group project where you had to combine your work with that of a colleague of a different engineering discipline but the absence of an efficient means of doing so affected the project’s overall outcome? Well, for software and hardware engineers developing an SoC, the merging of their respective engineering efforts for verification purposes is a big challenge. Early... » read more

How Silicon Carbide Is Improving Energy Efficiency & Lowering Costs In Industrial Applications


Industrial applications such as server power supplies, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), and motor drives consume a significant portion of the world’s power. Thus, any increase in the efficiency of any end user power system will substantially reduce a company’s operating costs. Combined with greater power density and better thermal performance, the demand for high-efficiency power suppl... » read more

Tracking Re-Use Of Design IPs


Design teams have a great incentive to create design blocks or IPs that can be reused: Each time an IP is successfully reused, precious time is saved from project schedule. Of course, as easy as it sounds, achieving this goal in real life is not simple. In reality, the observation is that design libraries cannot be used as-is by multiple projects. Consider this scenario: A smart new graduate... » read more

Using New Technologies On Smaller Wafers


The industry is no longer held captive by sales from computing applications, such as personal computers, servers or even cellular phones and tablets. A diverse range of markets are contributing to growth seen by Lam and our customers. Cloud storage, machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), robotics, medical and automotive, including the ... » read more

The Future Of Embedded Monitoring, Part 1


Shall I compare thee to a…Rolls Royce jet engine? ‘There is a new era dawning whereby deeply embedded sensing within all technology will bring about great benefit for the reliability and performance of semiconductor-based products.’ These were my words during a presentation to an industry audience in China back in September 2015. During that same presentation, somewhat to the consterna... » read more

Extreme Quality Semiconductor Manufacturing


By Ben Tsai and Cathy Perry Sullivan Across the full range of semiconductor device types and design nodes, there is a drive to produce chips with significantly higher quality. Automotive, IoT and other industrial applications require chips that achieve very high reliability over a long period of time, and some of these chips must maintain reliable performance while operating in an environmen... » read more

6 Signs You Need A Yield Management System


We often speak to companies who don’t know if they need yield management software yet. While most semiconductor companies need to invest in yield management, there could be instances where you’ll get by without one for a while. This article is for companies that use an internal option (such as Excel or JMP) and those who don’t have yield management at all. We will share the six most obvio... » read more

Software Is At Least As Important As Hardware For Inference Accelerators


In articles and conference presentations on Inference Accelerators, the focus is primarily on TOPS (frequency times number of MACs), a little bit on memory (DRAM interfaces and on chip SRAM), very little on interconnect (also very important, but that’s another story) and almost nothing on the software! Without software, the inference accelerator is a rock that does nothing. Software is wha... » read more

Verification Planning And Management With Formal


Over the last twenty years, formal verification has grown from a niche technology practiced only by specialists to an essential part of mainstream chip development. Along the way, several advances were needed to make wider adoption of formal feasible. These included the standardization of assertion languages, enhanced formal engine performance and capacity, better debug capabilities, and pushbu... » read more

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