What Makes A Chip Design Successful Today?


"Transistors are free" was the rallying cry of the semiconductor industry during the 1990s and early 2000s. That is no longer true. The end of Dennard scaling made the simultaneous use of all the transistors troublesome, but transistors remained effectively unlimited. This led to an era where large amounts of flexibility could be built into a chip. It didn't matter if all of it was being use... » read more

Mitigating Risk Through Verification


Verification is all about mitigating risk, and one of the growing issues alongside of increasing complexity and new architectures is coverage. The whole notion of coverage is making sure a chip will work as designed. That requires determining the effectiveness of the simulation tests that stimulate it, and its effectiveness in terms of activating structures of functional behavior and design.... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP UltraSoC debuted functional safety-focused Lockstep Monitor, a set of configurable IP blocks that are protocol aware and can be used to cross-check outputs, bus transactions, code execution, and register states between two or more redundant systems. It supports all common lockstep / redundancy architectures, including full dual-redundant lockstep, split/lock, master/checker, and... » read more

Overcoming Gender Stereotypes In Tech


Gender inequality in the workplace is more complex and deep-rooted than most studies have shown, and efforts to address those issues are only scratching the surface. The problem runs deeper than just moving women into upper management. It extends all the way through organizations in ways that aren't always obvious. “I've been talking to senior women in engineering and junior women in en... » read more

Cracking The Auto IC Market


The market for automotive electronics is booming, and it has set off a global scramble among established chipmakers and startups. What's becoming clear, though, is that not everyone understands just how different automotive is from the mobile market. Mobile is still the highest-volume market for semiconductors, but the growth has flattened. In contrast, the value of the automotive electronic... » read more

Is Software Necessary?


Hardware must be capable of running any software. While that might have been a good mantra when chips were relatively simple, it becomes an impossible verification task when dealing with SoCs that contain dozens of deeply embedded processors. When does it become necessary to use production software and what problems can that get you into? When verification targets such as power are added, it... » read more

Verification As A Flow (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the transformation of verification from a tool to a flow with Vladislav Palfy, global manager application engineering for OneSpin Solutions; Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification Systems; Mark Olen, product marketing group manager for Mentor, A Siemens Business; Larry Melling, product management director, System & Verificati... » read more

Safety, Security And PPA Tradeoffs


Safety and security are emerging as key design tradeoffs as chips are added into safety-critical markets, adding even more complexity into an already complicated optimization process. In the early days of semiconductor design, performance and area were traded off against each other. Then power became important, and the main tradeoffs became power, performance and area (PPA). But as chips inc... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Siemens acquired Austemper Design Systems, which provides tools for functional safety and safety-critical designs. Founded in 2015, Texas-based Austemper adds state-of-the-art safety analysis, auto-correction and fault simulation technology to address random hardware faults, as well as correct and harden vulnerable areas, subsequently performing fault simulation to ensure the design is... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A MIPS has reportedly been acquired again, this time by AI startup Wave Computing. Wave focuses on data center-based neural network training using its parallel dataflow processing architecture. In March, the company signed on to use 64-bit multi-threaded processor cores from MIPS in future projects. Previously, MIPS was owned by Tallwood Venture Capital, which acquired MIPS from Imaginat... » read more

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