Blog Review: Aug. 11


Arm's Rahul Mathur finds that traditional interconnects have become a bottleneck for improving IC performance and suggests buried interconnects as a way to lower signal routing delay. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out forksheet FETs, a new transistor type that could allow scaling past 3nm, and the interconnect advances that will need to accompany it. A Synopsys writer explains the new LP... » read more

Auto Displays: Bigger, Brighter, More Numerous


Displays are rapidly becoming more critical to the central brains in automobiles, accelerating the adoption and evolution of this technology to handle multiple types of audio, visual, and other data traffic coming into and flowing throughout the vehicle. These changes are having a broad impact on the entire design-through-manufacturing flow for display chip architectures. In the past, these ... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 4


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as industry luminaries celebrate 50 years of the microprocessor with a discussion on major challenges to the growth of microprocessors, inflection points over the last 50 years, and predictions for the next 25. Siemens EDA's Vladimir Kirichenko warns that designing electrical and thermal systems separately may lead to various problems such as late design ch... » read more

Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry


The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

Sweeping Changes Ahead For Systems Design


Data centers are undergoing a fundamental change, shifting from standard processing models to more data-centric approaches based upon customized hardware, less movement of data, and more pooling of resources. Driven by a flood of web searches, Bitcoin mining, video streaming, data centers are in a race to provide the most efficient and fastest processing possible. But because there are so ma... » read more

Continuous Education For Engineers


Continuous education is essential for engineers, but many companies don't recognize the value or they are unwilling to provide the necessary resources. This should be a line of questioning before every new hire makes the decision about where they want to work, because it not only affects their future career, but also impacts the value they can provide to that company during the course of the... » read more

Blog Review: July 28


Synopsys' Chris Clark considers potential vulnerabilities in automotive over-the-air updates and best practices and new standards the industry can implement to improve security of vehicle software updates. Cadence's Paul McLellan gets a look at expected new fab construction in the coming years and where capacity is being focused. Siemens' Robin Bornoff dives into electromagnetic simulatio... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Security Xilinx is investing an undisclosed amount in fabless semiconductor startup Kameleon Security, which is working on a cyber protection chip for servers, data centers, and cloud computing. The proactive Security Processing Unit (ProSPU) already secures the boot and has a root of trust (RoT). The chip will be demonstrated at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, which is planned f... » read more

Blog Review: July 21


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as Partha Ranganathan of Google argues that a new era of Moore's Law is emerging, defined both by the efficient design of hardware accelerators and improving the ways that hardware is utilized. Siemens EDA's Chris Spear continues exploring classes in SystemVerilog with a look at the relationship between the class variables that point to an object and how to... » read more

New Power, Performance Options At The Edge


Increasing compute intelligence at the edge is forcing chip architects to rethink how computing gets partitioned and prioritized, and what kinds of processing elements and memory configurations work best for a particular application. Sending raw data to the cloud for processing is both time- and resource-intensive, and it's often unnecessary because most of the data collected by a growing nu... » read more

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