Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Synopsys and 3D virtual-environment company Dassault Systèmes are collaborating on an automotive lighting system development platform. Synopsys’ optical design tools — LucidShape, LightTools, and CODE V — will be integrated with Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, which is used by automotive teams from different disciplines to work together on designs and simulations. ... » read more

Six Things We Might Need For Pervasive Computing


There is little doubt that digital technology will become more pervasive than it is even now in the coming decades. Organizations like the Exponential Group argue that digital should be the first step in sustainability, estimating that hardware and software could help reduce emissions by 15% by 2030 and beyond by helping fine-tune buildings, factories, and other environments. Cars—already ... » read more

HBM3: Big Impact On Chip Design


An insatiable demand for bandwidth in everything from high-performance computing to AI training, gaming, and automotive applications is fueling the development of the next generation of high-bandwidth memory. HBM3 will bring a 2X bump in bandwidth and capacity per stack, as well as some other benefits. What was once considered a "slow and wide" memory technology to reduce signal traffic dela... » read more

Rising Fortunes For ICs In Health Care


Semiconductors are increasingly finding their way into a variety of medical devices, after years of slow growth and largely consumer electronics types of applications. Nearly every major chipmaker has a toehold in health care these days, and many are starting to look beyond wearable such as the Apple Watch to devices that can be relied on for accuracy and reliability. Unlike in the past, the... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 13


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out what Google learned in developing multiple generations of its TPU processor, including unequal advancement of logic and memory, the importance of compiler of compatibility, and designing for total cost of ownership. Siemens EDA's Jake Wiltgen argues for the importance of linting as part of eliminating systematic failures in designs complying with ISO 26262.... » read more

Execution Dependence Extension (EDE): ISA Support For Eliminating Fences


Fence instructions are a coarse-grained mechanism to enforce the order of instruction execution in an out-of-order pipeline. They are an overkill for cases when only one instruction must wait for the completion of one other instruction. For example, this is the case when performing undo logging in Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) systems: while the update of a variable needs to wait until the correspo... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 6


Arizona State University's Jae-sun Seo and Arm's Paul Whatmough introduce a fully-parallel and fully-pipelined FPGA accelerator for sparse CNNs that can eliminate off-chip memory access and also efficiently support elementwise pruning of CNN weights. Cadence's Paul McLellan highlights trends seen at the recent Hot Chips, from machine learning and advanced packaging driving higher performance... » read more

Overview Of Medical Chip Challenges


Medical devices are adopting, and increasingly adapting, a variety of semiconductor technologies to provide new functions and capabilities in smaller form factors. In doing so, they are leveraging increasing processing capabilities, lower power, and new types of sensors to propel health care forward. Many different chip types have been used in medical devices for years, many of them develope... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 29


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out two of the biggest chips presented at the recent Hot Chips: a graphics chip from Intel for an upcoming supercomputer and Cerebras' wafer-scale AI chip. Synopsys' Datsen Davies Tharakan lists the top five design challenges for electric vehicles and power semiconductors and why a robust design flow can accelerate the growth of hybrid and electric vehicles goi... » read more

Software-Hardware Co-Design Becomes Real


For the past 20 years, the industry has sought to deploy hardware/software co-design concepts. While it is making progress, software/hardware co-design appears to have a much brighter future. In order to understand the distinction between the two approaches, it is important to define some of the basics. Hardware/software co-design is essentially a bottom-up process, where hardware is deve... » read more

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