Digging Much Deeper With Unit Retest


Keeping test costs flat in the face of product complexity continues to challenge both product and test engineers. Increased data collection at package-level test and the ability to respond to it in a never-before level of detail has prompted device makers and assembly and test houses to tighten up their retest processes. Test metrology, socket contamination, and mechanical alignment have alw... » read more

Signal Connectivity Checks Are Not Just For Design-For-Test Teams


By Pawini Mahajan and Raja Koneru The complexity with system-on-chip (SoC) design continues to grow, creating greater complexity of the corresponding design-for-test (DFT) logic required for manufacturing tests. Design teams are challenged not only by high gate counts and the array of internally developed and third-party IP integrated into their designs: the need to achieve high-quality manu... » read more

The Next Generation of Testbench Debug Productivity


It is widely accepted that verification consumes at least sixty percent of time and resources on most semiconductor development projects. This statistic has been borne out by many industry surveys over the last twenty years. Verification technology has had to evolve to accommodate ever larger and more complex designs. Innovations such as constrained-random simulation and the Universal Verificat... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Siemens Digital Industries Software acquired Nextflow Software, a provider of advanced particle-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions. Nextflow Software will become part of the Simcenter software portfolio, providing rapid meshless CFD capabilities to accelerate the analysis of complex transient applications in the automotive, aerospace, and marine industries such as gear box lubri... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — IoT, edge, cloud, data center, and back To simplify IoT workflows, Arm announced that it is putting parts of its Common Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS) into an open project called Open-CMSIS-Pack. The CMSIS is a vendor-independent abstraction layer for MCUs, especially Arm Cortex-M processors, that makes it possible for developers to deal with softwa... » read more

Big Changes Ahead For Connected Vehicles


Carmakers are reworking their electronic architectures so they can tap into a growing number of external services and internal options, similar to the way a data center taps into various services over its internal network. In the past, this has been largely confined to internal services such as on-board Internet connectivity, and external traffic routing and music. The current vision is to g... » read more

The Case For FPGAs In Cars


Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) thrive in rapidly evolving new markets before being replaced by hard-wired ASICs, but in automotive that crossover is likely to happen significantly later than in the past. Historically, FPGAs have held temporary positions until volumes increased enough to cost-reduce the FPGAs out in favor of a hardened version. With automobiles, there are so many chan... » read more

System-on-Chip Architecture For Autonomous Driving Systems In Electric Vehicles


English inventor Thomas Parker introduced the first production electric car in 1884. Slower speeds and shorter ranges limited the electric cars of that era. By the early-to-mid 20th century, gas-powered cars were cheaper to operate, able to travel further and faster than their electric counterparts, and quickly rose to dominance. Since the early 2000s, Tesla has been a pioneer in reviving the e... » read more

The Good And Bad Of Auto IC Updates


Keeping automobiles updated enough to avoid problems is becoming increasingly difficult as more complex electronics are added into vehicles, and as the lifetimes of those devices are extended to a decade or more. Modern vehicles are full of electronics. In fact, the value of electronic devices used in modern vehicles is expected to double in the next 10 years, growing to $469 billion by 2030... » read more

When It Makes Sense To Perform An Open Source Audit


Today's software is not created so much as assembled. The parts that serve as ingredients come from a variety of sources, but mostly from the millions of open source components freely available on the internet. This has enabled a digital transformation in several industries, helping market leaders speed their time to market, lower costs, and improve innovation. But what are the licensing and... » read more

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