The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor unveiled new formal-based technologies in the Questa Verification Solution. It offers formal-based RTL-to-RTL equivalence checking flows optimized for verification of manual low-power clock gating, bug fix and ECO validation, and ISO 26262 safety mechanism verification, which the company says which can reduce verification turnaround time by 10X. The app also offers expanded cloc... » read more

Moore’s Law: A Status Report


Moore's Law has been synonymous with "smaller, faster, cheaper" for the past 52 years, but increasingly it is viewed as just one of a number of options—some competing, some complementary—as the chip industry begins zeroing in on specific market needs. This does not make [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] any less relevant. The number of companies racing from 16/14nm to 7nm is higher t... » read more

Cloud Computing Chips Changing


An explosion in cloud services is making chip design for the server market more challenging, more diverse, and much more competitive. Unlike datacenter number crunching of the past, the cloud addresses a broad range of applications and data types. So while a server chip architecture may work well for one application, it may not be the optimal choice for another. And the more those tasks beco... » read more

Supporting CPUs Plus FPGAs (Part 3)


While it has been possible to pair a CPU and FPGA for quite some time, two things have changed recently. First, the industry has reduced the latency of the connection between them and second, we now appear to have the killer app for this combination. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these changes and the state of the tool chain to support this combination, with Kent Orthner, system... » read more

Blog Review: April 19


Mentor's Tom Fitzpatrick explains what the Portable Stimulus standard will do, what it won't, and why the choice of input language defined by the standard matters. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as IRDS chairman Paolo Gargini explains how long it takes technology breakthroughs to make out of the lab and into high-volume manufacturing. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi points to the recent sound... » read more

The Hunt For A Low-Power PHY


Physics has been on the side of chipmakers throughout most of the lifetime of [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"], but when dealing with the world outside the chip, physics is working against them. Pushing data at ever-faster rates through boards and systems consumes increasing amounts of power, but the power budget for chips has not been increasing. Could chips be constrained by their int... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synapse Design acquired Asilicon, a design services firm based in Ranchi Jharkhand, India. Through the acquisition, Synapse Design adds a second design center in India and gains an additional 80 engineers. "The focus of the Ranchi office will be to provide lower-cost offshore design center services for our customer's designs targeting 7- and 10-nm process technology," said Satish Bag... » read more

The Hidden Costs Of Security


There is no argument these days among chipmakers that security needs to be implemented at every level. So why isn't it happening? The answer is more complex than companies pinching pennies, although that is certainly a factor for some chips. The reality, though, is security carries a price for every facet of semiconductor design—power, performance and area. And the impact reaches much furt... » read more

Understanding Voltage Drop Mechanics


As a fundamental concept of electronic design, voltage drop ranks highly as one to understand well. I particularly appreciate when industry folks come up with creative ways to get the point across. Jerry Zhao, a product management director at Cadence and I were discussing how to best manage dynamic and static voltage drop, but I first asked him to explain the difference between the two. I p... » read more

The Efficiency Problem


The field of automotive automation has been the driver – so to speak – of the next leap of innovation in the field of transportation. Car architectures are being re-engineered to take advantage of incredible leaps in automation, using more powerful processors that process more data than ever before. The recent focus on autonomous automobile technology could be due to the ongoing drop in ... » read more

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