How To Justify A Data Center


The breadth of cloud capabilities and improvements in cost and licensing structures is prompting chipmakers to consider offloading at least some of their design work into the cloud. Cloud is a viable business today for semiconductor design. Over the past decade, the interest in moving to cloud computing has grown from an idea that was fun to talk about — but which no one was serious about ... » read more

Planning EDA’s Next Steps


Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's new CEO, and the recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award in December, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's next in EDA, the underlying technology and business challenges and changes, and new markets that are unfolding for floor-planning, verification, CFD, and advanced packaging. SE: Where does EDA need to improve? Devgan: We have made it much... » read more

Preparing For Test Early In The Design Flow


Until very recently, semiconductor design, verification, and test were separate domains. Those domains have since begun to merge, driven by rising demand for reliability, shorter market windows, and increasingly complex chip architectures. In the past, products were designed from a functional perspective, and designers were not concerned about what the physical implementation of the product ... » read more

Data Center Architectures In Flux


Data center architectures are becoming increasingly customized and heterogeneous, shifting from processors made by a single vendor to a mix of processors and accelerators made by multiple vendors — including system companies' own design teams. Hyperscaler data centers have been migrating toward increasingly heterogeneous architectures for the past half decade or so, spurred by the rising c... » read more

Why RISC-V Is Succeeding


There is no disputing the excitement surround the introduction of the RISC-V processor architecture. Yet while many have called it a harbinger of a much broader open-source hardware movement, the reasons behind its success are not obvious, and the implications for an expansion of more open-source cores is far from certain. “The adoption of RISC-V as the preferred architecture for many sili... » read more

Does EDA Sell Fear?


I worked in the EDA industry for over 30 years and a common lament I heard was that the EDA industry survived by selling fear. Your new chip will fail if you do not buy the latest tool offering. There always seemed to be a natural dislike for the EDA industry and many users thought the industry overcharged and was unable to innovate. I never quite understood the reasoning. A recent comment, ... » read more

Preparing For 3D-ICs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

The Indispensables: The Diverse Electronic System Design Ecosystem


My summer of 2021 reading included a book called “The Indispensables: The Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware” by Patrick K. O'Donnell. The book told the thrilling and largely forgotten history of the fishermen from Marblehead, Mass., a town 20 miles north of Boston, and their critical role in the Revolutionary War. M... » read more

Improving PPA In Complex Designs With AI


The goal of chip design always has been to optimize power, performance, and area (PPA), but results can vary greatly even with the best tools and highly experienced engineering teams. Optimizing PPA involves a growing number of tradeoffs that can vary by application, by availability of IP and other components, as well as the familiarity of engineers with different tools and methodologies. Fo... » read more

Spreadsheets: Still Valuable, But More Limited


Spreadsheets have been an invaluable engineering tool for many aspects of semiconductor design and verification, but their inability to handle complexity is squeezing them out of an increasing number of applications. This is raising questions about whether they still have a role, and if so, how large that role will be. There are two sides to this issue. On one side are the users who see them... » read more

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