The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys acquired materials modeling company QuantumWise. QuantumWise tools focus on atomic-scale modeling of nanostructures using quantum-mechanical computational methods, classical potentials, and electrostatic models. Based in Denmark, the company was started in 2008 when it acquired the assets of Atomistix. The technology will be integrated with Synopsys' Sentaurus TCAD. Terms of t... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 20


Mentor's Jeff Miller warns that MEMS accelerometers are vulnerable to takeover using specially constructed sound waves, as demonstrated in a new paper. Synopsys' Pooja Gupta and Srinivas Vijayaragavan explain some major technology updates in SAS 24G with a look at Binary primitives, Extended Binary primitives and primitive parameters. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares highlights from TSMC's ... » read more

Managing Peak Power


Peak power is becoming a serious design constraint across chips and entire electronic systems as more functionality is added into end devices and the compute and switching infrastructure needed to support them. The issues are a direct result of growing complexity in designs, fixed or shrinking power budgets, and the need to process more data more quickly. In mobile devices, the addition of m... » read more

Power Modeling and Analysis


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power modeling and analysis with [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], chief technology officer at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; [getperson id="11763" comment="Tobias Bjerregaard"], chief executive officer for [getentity id="22908" e_name="Teklatech"]; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategy officer at [getentity id="22021"... » read more

Light In A Package


Silicon photonics is gaining significant traction inside the data center, but creating a simpler method of packaging the laser with other circuitry remains a stumbling block for cutting costs and using this technology across a wider swath of applications. Progress does appear to be on the horizon, even though exact time frames remain unclear. The advantages of light in communications are wel... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled a new equivalence checking tool which features a massively parallel architecture capable of scaling to 100s of CPUs and adaptive proof technology that analyzes each partition and determines the optimal formal algorithm. According to the company, the Conformal Smart Logic Equivalence Checker provides an average of 4X runtime improvement with the same resources over the pr... » read more

Frenzy At 10/7nm


The number of chipmakers rushing to 10/7nm is rising, despite a slowdown in Moore's Law scaling and the increased difficulty and cost of developing chips at the most advanced nodes. How long this trend continues remains to be seen. It's likely that 7/5nm will require new manufacturing equipment, tools, materials and transistor structures. Beyond that, there is no industry-accepted roadmap, m... » read more

Expanding Ecosystem Drives Automotive Semiconductor Gold Rush


Semiconductor chips designed to support automotive applications have been around for more than 40 years, a very long time in the technology business. These chips have been developed by semiconductor integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), who control every step of the design, manufacturing, test, qualification, reliability and quality aspects of these automotive chips. On top of that, special s... » read more

Multi-Physics Combats Commoditization


The semiconductor industry has benefited greatly from developments around digital circuitry. Circuits have grown in size from a few logic gates in the 1980s to well over 1 billion today. In comparison, analog circuits have increased in size by a factor of 10. The primary reason is that digital logic managed to isolate many of the physical effects from functionality, and to provide abstractions ... » read more

Power Modeling And Analysis


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power modeling and analysis with [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], chief technology officer at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; [getperson id="11763" comment="Tobias Bjerregaard"], CEO for [getentity id="22908" e_name="Teklatech"]; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategy officer at [getentity id="22021" e_name="ANSYS"]; An... » read more

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