EDA In The Cloud


Interest in the use of third-party public clouds in conjunction with electronic design automation (EDA) applications has never been higher. Back in February, Ed Sperling and I did a video interview (embedded below) to discuss EDA and cloud computing. This article follows up on that interview, providing some additional insight into why and how the integrated circuit (IC) industry reached this po... » read more

Do You Trust Your IP Supplier?


How much do you trust your IP supplier, regardless of whether IP was developed in-house or by a third-party provider? And what implications does it have a system integrator? These are important questions that many companies are beginning to ask. Today, there are few methods, other than documentation, that provide the necessary information. The software industry may be ahead of the hardware i... » read more

Power Management Becomes Top Issue Everywhere


Power management is becoming a bigger challenge across a wide variety of applications, from consumer products such as televisions and set-top-boxes to large data centers, where the cost of cooling server racks to offset the impact of thermal dissipation can be enormous. Several years ago, low-power design was largely relegated to mobile devices that were dependent on a battery. Since then, i... » read more

A Complete System-Level Security Verification Methodology


Hardware is at the root of all digital systems, and security must be considered during the system-on-chip (SoC) design and verification process. Verifying the security of an SoC design is challenging because of time to market pressure and resource constraints. Resources allocated to the already time-consuming task of functional verification must be diverted to security verification, which requi... » read more

Reducing Power At RTL


Power management and reduction at the register transfer level is becoming more problematic as more heterogeneous elements are added into advanced designs and more components are dependent on interactions with other components. This has been a growing problem in leading-edge designs for the past couple of process nodes, but similar issues have begun creeping into less-sophisticated designs as... » read more

Brighter Future For Photonics


Photons increasingly are taking over where electrons are failing in communications, but mixing the two never has been easy. There always have been two potential implementation paths — building each on its own substrate and then stacking them, or building them on a single substrate. The tradeoff between the two solutions is more complex than it may initially appear, and ongoing improvements... » read more

Machine Learning… Everywhere


AI is transforming the world around us, creating an avenue to innovation across all sectors of the global economy. Today, AI can interact with humans through natural language; identify bank fraud and protect computer networks; drive cars around city streets; and play complex games like chess and Go. Machine-learning is offering solutions to many complex problems around us where analytical solut... » read more

Making Sure RISC-V Designs Work As Expected


The RISC-V instruction set architecture is attracting attention across a wide swath of markets, but making sure devices based on the RISC-V ISA work as expected is proving as hard, if not harder, than other commercially available ISA-based chips. The general consensus is that open source lacks the safety net of commercially available IP and tools. Characterization tends to be generalized, ra... » read more

Big Design, IP and End Market Shifts In 2020


EDA is on a roll. Design starts are up significantly thanks to increased investment in areas such as AI, a plethora of new communications standards, buildout of the Cloud, the race toward autonomous driving and continued advancements in mobile phones. Many designs demand the latest technologies and push the limits of complexity. Low power is becoming more than just reducing wasted power at t... » read more

Moore’s Law, Supply Chains And Security


The debate about the future of Moore's Law continues, while other parts of the industry look for alternatives. In between, supply chains are being pulled in multiple directions, with safety and security often in the middle. All across the semiconductor industry, significant changes are underway. Some of these have been in the works for some time. Others are new or accelerating faster than an... » read more

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