The End Of Closed EDA


In a previous life, I was a technologist for a large EDA company. One of my primary responsibilities in that position involved talking to a lot of customers to identify their pain points, and what new tools we could develop that would ease their problems. You would think that would be an easy task, but it certainly was not the case. For example, if you ask a developer what their biggest frus... » read more

Strengthening The Global Semi Supply Chain


Within the semiconductor ecosystem, there are a number of dynamics pointing to the need for new ways of partnering in more meaningful ways that bring resiliency to the global semiconductor supply chain. One of these is the move to bespoke silicon, stemming from a shift in the companies that create most SoCs today -- the hyperscalar cloud providers. These market leaders know their workloads so w... » read more

Can ML Help Verification? Maybe


Functional verification produces an enormous amount of data that could be used to train a machine learning system, but it's not always clear which data is useful or whether it can help. The challenge with ML is understanding when and where to use it, and how to integrate it with other tools and approaches. With a big enough hammer, it is tempting to call everything a nail, and just throwing ... » read more

New Data Management Challenges


An explosion in semiconductor design and manufacturing data, and the expanding use of chips in safety-critical and mission-critical applications, is prompting chipmakers to collect and manage that data more effectively in order to improve overall performance and reliability. This collection of data reveals a number of challenges with no simple solutions. Data may be siloed and inconsistent, ... » read more

The Next Incarnation Of EDA


The EDA industry has incrementally addressed issues as they arise in the design of electronic systems, but is there about to be a disruption? Academia is certainly seeing that as a possibility, but not all of them see it happening for the same reason. The academic community questioned the future of EDA at the recent Design Automation Conference. Rather than EDA as we know it going away, they... » read more

Chasing The Next Level Of Productivity


The keynotes at the recent Design Automation Conference (DAC) gave some great insights into the direction of semiconductor technology and chip and system design. For the first time in a long time, my family members and friends have gained awareness of the importance of semiconductors and electronic design automation. I think this means it is also time to look back on where productivity improvem... » read more

Machine Learning-Driven Full-Flow Chip Design Automation


To enable the semiconductor industry to continue growing, the chip design process must become more efficient. With the availability of massive, cloud-enabled, distributed computing and advancements in machine learning computer science, the next chip design automation revolution is now possible. The Cadence® Cerebrus™ Intelligent Chip Explorer utilizes both of these technologies, based o... » read more

Cryogenic CMOS Becomes Cool


Cryogenic CMOS is a technology on the cusp, promising higher performance and lower power with no change in fabrication technology. The question now is whether it becomes viable and mainstream. Technologies often appear to be just on the horizon, not quite making it, but never too far out of sight. That's usually because some issue plagues it, and the incentive is not big enough to solve the ... » read more

Electronics And Its Role In Climate Change


Sustainability has become a “scorching topic” (pun intended) in discussions I have with customers and ecosystem partners. It is now vital to many corporations as part of what many they report on “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG). It can also be very confusing. In this post, I am trying to clarify some confusion after attending and organizing several related events recently. ... » read more

Need Design Talent? Create a Contest


Amid a labor crunch for qualified engineers, semiconductor ecosystem participants are coming up with new strategies to entice university students, such as design competitions. In one design competition sponsored by Renesas earlier this year for European university students and their educators, teams were tasked with building a self-guided robot that could drive along a track in a virtual sim... » read more

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