Anatomy Of A System Simulation


The semiconductor industry has greatly simplified analysis by consolidating around a small number of models and abstractions, but that capability is breaking down both at the implementation level and at the system level. Today, the biggest pressure is coming from the systems industry, where the electronic content is a small fraction of what must be integrated together. Systems companies tend... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman. Canon uncorked a nanoimprint lithography system, which the company said will be useful down to about the 5nm node. Unlike traditional lithography equipment, which projects a pattern onto a resist, nanoimprint directly transfers images onto substrates using a master stamp patterned by an e-beam system. The technology has a number of limitations and... » read more

Industry Pressure Grows For Simulating Systems Of Systems


Most complex systems are designed in a top-down manner, but as the amount of electronic content in those systems increases, so does the pressure on the chip industry to provide high-level models and simulation capabilities. Those models either do not exist today, or they exist in isolation. No matter how capable a model or simulator, there never will be one that can do it all. In some cases,... » read more

What Happened To Portable Stimulus?


In June 2018, Accellera released the initial version of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS), a new verification language that was slated to be the first new abstraction defined within EDA for a couple of decades. So what happened to it? Apart from a few updates at DVCon, there appears to be little talk about it today. However, the industry has its head down trying to make it work, ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm filed its registration statement for a highly anticipated IPO. Chip industry heavyweights Apple, Samsung, NVIDIA, and Intel are all expected to invest. Find the SEC filing here. Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) laid out a 10-year initiative to bolster its IC design market share to 40% worldwide by 2033, with the first year’s budget of US $376 million. The sh... » read more

What’s Required To Secure Chips


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about how to verify that a semiconductor design will be secure, with Mike Borza, Synopsys scientist; John Hallman, product manager for trust and security at Siemens EDA; Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; and Dave Kelf, CEO of Breker Verification. ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Apple plans to spend an additional €1 billion (~$1.1B) over the next six years to expand its Munich, Germany-based Silicon Design Centre, including the construction of a new research facility. "The expansion of our European Silicon Design Centre will enable an even closer collaboration between our more than 2,000 engineers in Bavaria working on breakthrough innovations, including custom sil... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Worldwide semiconductor revenue increased 1.1% in 2022 to $601.7 billion, up from $595 billion in 2021, according to preliminary results from Gartner. The combined revenue of the top 25 semiconductor vendors increased 2.8% in 2022 and accounted for 77.5% of the market. The memory segment posted a 10% revenue decrease. Analog showed the strongest growth, up 19% from 2021, followed by discretes, ... » read more

Extending The Benefits Of UVM To Include AMS: An Update On Accellera’s UVM-AMS Standard Development


By Tom Fitzpatrick and Peter Grove SoC teams can be divided up into design and verification groups. For digital designs, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), initially developed by Accellera and now standardized as IEEE 1800.2, has been the industry standard for the past decade. Since most SoC designs also have analog and mixed-signal IP blocks, it would be ideal for verification en... » read more

Design For Security Now Essential For Chips, Systems


It's nearly impossible to create a completely secure chip or system, but much can be done to raise the level of confidence about that security. In the past, security was something of an afterthought, disconnected from the architecture and added late in the design cycle. But as chips are used increasingly in safety- and mission-critical systems, and as the value of data continues to rise, the... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →