Adding NoCs To FPGA SoCs


FPGA SoCs straddle the line between flexibility and performance by combining elements of both FPGAs and ASICs. But as they find a home in more safety- and mission-critical markets, they also are facing some of the same issues as standard SoCs, including the ability to move larger and larger amounts of data quickly throughout an increasingly complex device, and the difficulty in verifying and de... » read more

The Skies Over EDA Are Finally Cloudy


EDA companies have been talking for years about providing access to their tools in the cloud, including more articles than I can count with titles about the EDA forecast being cloudy, clouds on the horizon, and so forth. The title of this post continues the dubious tradition of cloud-based puns, but there’s no future tense involved. Recent announcements from several EDA companies make it appe... » read more

DAC 2018: System Design, Cloud And Machine Learning


This marks the 10th DAC that I have covered as a blogger. At DAC 2008 in Anaheim, the industry had just come together behind the SystemC TLM 2.0 standard to enable virtual platforms, finally getting to model interoperability. System design is the common thread that is also present in this year’s DAC in 2018 in San Francisco. But a lot has changed. Big data analytics, artificial intelligence a... » read more

Tuesday At DAC 2018


The morning starts with the Accellera Breakfast. Accellera has made some significant progress this year and we can expect to hear about the approval of the Portable Stimulus 1.0 specification later in the conference as well as the initial release of SystemC CCI as well as a proposal for the creation of an IP Security Assurance Working Group, which will discuss standards development to address s... » read more

Monday At DAC 2018


DAC #55 started with rumors flying. Will this be the last DAC as we know it? Is there a huge chasm forming between academia and the industry? Will DAC be able to make it in Las Vegas where there is no local interest? Of course, those who have been in the industry know that this kind of speculation happens every few years, and in the 80s, Las Vegas was a very popular location for DAC. There was ... » read more

Can AI Alter The Burgeoning Design Cost Trend?


Everyone in the semiconductor design arena has experienced or at least observed the impact of increasing costs for complex SoC silicon. Semico’s recently released report entitled "Silicon and Software Design Cost Analysis" reveals the cost associated with a first time design effort for a high-end, advanced performance multicore SoC using 7nm process technology can top $195M for both the silic... » read more

CEO Outlook On Chip Industry (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics; and Dean Drako, CEO of IC Manage. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one, click here. Part two is here. L-R: Dean Drako, Grant Pierce, Wally Rhines, Simon Segars. Photo: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance SE: Securit... » read more

Design Automation For Silicon Photonics: Pushing Research Into Production


Silicon photonics is a transformative technology that will have a major impact on system architectures in future IC design applications. Already a major solution for Datacom applications and emerging applications in sensing, design techniques in silicon photonics, with the ability to leverage CMOS technology to integrate large numbers of photonic components, are now being applied to enable opti... » read more

CEO Outlook On Chip Industry (Part 2)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics; and Dean Drako, CEO of IC Manage. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one, click here. L-R: Dean Drako, Grant Pierce, Wally Rhines, Simon Segars. Photo: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance SE: AI, deep learning and mac... » read more

Get Ready For Verification 3.0


Jim Hogan, managing partner of Vista Ventures, LLC, is perhaps the best-known investor in the EDA space. Recently, he has been focusing time and attention on verification startups, including cloud technology company Metrics, and Portable Stimulus pioneer Breker Verification Systems. This adds to his longer-term commitment to formal verification with OneSpin Solutions. These companies are part ... » read more

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