Smart Manufacturing Makes Gains In Chip Industry


Lights out manufacturing is gaining steam across the semiconductor industry, accelerating productivity, improving quality, and reducing costs and environment impact. These benefits are the result of years of strategic investments in technologies like machine-to-machine communication, data analytics, and robotics to achieve higher levels of autonomy. Semiconductor factories have long depen... » read more

ESD Co-Design For High-Speed SerDeS In FinFET Technologies


An electronic device is susceptible to Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) damage during its entire life cycle, including the phase from the completion of the silicon wafer processing to when the device (die) is assembled in the system. To avoid yield loss due to ESD damage during this early phase, on-chip ESD protection measures are applied to provide a certain degree of ESD robustness. The componen... » read more

Welcome To EDA 4.0 And The AI-Driven Revolution


By Dan Yu, Harry Foster, and Tom Fitzpatrick Welcome to the era of EDA 4.0, where we are witnessing a revolutionary transformation in electronic design automation driven by the power of artificial intelligence. The history of EDA can be delineated into distinct periods marked by significant technological advancements that have propelled faster design iterations, improved productivity, and fu... » read more

Chip Design CEO Outlook


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president for IC EDA at Siemens Digital Industries Software; John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions; John Lee, general manager and vice president of Ansys' Semiconductor Business Unit; Niels Faché, vice president and general manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight; Dean Drako, president and CEO of IC M... » read more

RL-Guided Detailed Routing Framework for Advanced Custom Circuits


A technical paper titled "Reinforcement Learning Guided Detailed Routing for Custom Circuits" was published by researchers at UT Austin, Princeton University, and NVIDIA. "This paper presents a novel detailed routing framework for custom circuits that leverages deep reinforcement learning to optimize routing patterns while considering custom routing constraints and industrial design rules. C... » read more

Making Tradeoffs With AI/ML/DL


Machine learning, deep learning, and AI increasingly are being used in chip design, and they are being used to design chips that are optimized for ML/DL/AI. The challenge is understanding the tradeoffs on both sides, both of which are becoming increasingly complex and intertwined. On the design side, machine learning has been viewed as just another tool in the design team's toolbox. That's s... » read more

Engineering Simulation Workloads And The Rise of the Cloud


Cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to improve the performance capabilities of their non-accelerated and accelerated compute instances, as well as augment their HPC infrastructure with domain-area expertise of targeted HPC workloads. Additionally, engineers, researchers, and scientists are becoming more comfortable with the types of workloads that can be run in the cloud within acceptable w... » read more

Accelerating Coverage Closure With AI-Based Verification Space Optimization


Coverage is at the heart of all modern semiconductor verification. There is no maxim more fundamental to this process than “if you haven’t exercised it, you haven’t verified it.” Although covering a particular aspect of a chip design does not guarantee that all bugs are found — bug effect propagation and checker quality are also key factors — it is certainly true that bugs cannot po... » read more

EDA Posts Q4 2022 Revenue of $3.9B


The ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community, announced today in its latest Electronic Design Market Data (EDMD) report that the Electronic System Design (ESD) industry revenue increased 11.3% from $3.47 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021 to $3.86 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022. The four-quarter moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four, rose 12.6... » read more

AI Adoption Slow For Design Tools


A lot of excitement, and a fair amount of hype, surrounds what artificial intelligence (AI) can do for the EDA industry. But many challenges must be overcome before AI can start designing, verifying, and implementing chips for us. Should AI replace the algorithms in use today, or does it have a different role to play? At the end of the day, AI is a technique that has strengths and weaknesses... » read more

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