The Week In Review: Design


Startups Two new companies unveiled this week – Metrics Technologies and Movellus. Metrics Technologies is providing a Software-as-a-Service SystemVerilog simulator and verification manager that are available as pay-per-minute. This allows companies to have fully elastic system capabilities to accommodate peak simulation demand. “Cloud technology and Software as a Service business mo... » read more

Driving By Ethernet


The race to add more sophisticated and safety-critical electronics into cars is forcing carmakers to revisit the communications systems within increasingly electrified and connected vehicles. Until very recently, communication between components within a vehicle was simplistic, and communication between vehicles was non-existent. All of that is changing quickly. Rapid and secure communicatio... » read more

Deep Learning Spreads


Deep learning is gaining traction across a broad swath of applications, providing more nuanced and complex behavior than machine learning offers today. Those attributes are particularly important for safety-critical devices, such as assisted or autonomous vehicles, as well as for natural language processing where a machine can recognize the intent of words based upon the context of a convers... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 31


Cadence's Paul McLellan looks back at where TSMC was 30 years ago and the founding philosophy that made the foundry and fabless model work. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls considers how to make the simplest possible multitasking scheduler with a one line RTOS. Synopsys' Sandeep Taneja checks out the technology behind airbags in cars and the role of the Motorola Serial Peripheral Interfac... » read more

Giant Auto Industry Disruption Ahead


The move to self-driving vehicles over the next decade or so will result in a massive restructuring of entire segments of the global economy that have evolved to create and support automobiles and the people who drive them. The shift will create many new jobs-particularly for semiconductors and electronic systems-and conservatively it will eliminate hundreds of thousands of existing ones. It... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Security Addressing the Meltdown and Spectre speculative execution vulnerabilities has not gone smoothly. Intel's firmware update caused unexpected behavior and a higher than expected number of reboots for its Haswell and Broadwell chips, leading the company to recommend users stop patching until an updated version of the patch is available. Microsoft's attempts to fix the issue left some W... » read more

Verification Of Functional Safety


Functional safety is becoming a key part of chip design, and an increasingly problematic one for many engineering teams. Functional safety for electrical and electronic systems is nothing new. It has been an important element of the military, aerospace and medical industries for many years. But the growing importance of functional safety within the automobile industry presents a number o... » read more

It Takes A Village… To Develop And Verify SoCs


In my last blog post from 2017, “Design Chains Will Drive The Top 5 EDA Trends In 2018,” I had pointed to the importance of ecosystems for electronics development in general. From an EDA perspective, it also takes a village to shepherd the actual chip development with its complex verification and software development tasks. And the types of partnerships often depend on the application domai... » read more

7/5nm Timing Closure Intensifies


Timing closure issues are increasing in magnitude at 7/5nm, and ones that were often considered minor in the past no longer can be ignored. Timing closure is an essential part of any chip design. The process ensures that all combinatorial paths through a design meet the necessary timing so that it can run reliably at a specified clock rate. Timing closure hasn't changed significantly over th... » read more

Predictions: Methodologies And Tools


Predictions are divided into four posts this year. Part one covered markets and drivers. The second part looked at manufacturing, devices and companies and this part will cover methodologies and tools. In addition, the outlook from EDA executives will be provided in a separate post. Intellectual property As designs get larger, it should be no surprise that the size of the [getkc id="43" kc_... » read more

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