Being A Player In The Automotive IC Market


The automotive IC market is loaded with opportunity and above-average growth rates. Arguably, the pursuit of this opportunity explains much of the astonishing M&A activity among the world's biggest semicos in recent years. The common denominator — whether for established auto IC vendors, big tech players edging into self-driving cars or automakers looking to design their own chips — is the ... » read more

Executive Insight: Wally Rhines


Wally Rhines, president and CEO of [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about industry consolidation, a shift in emphasis from chips to systems, and what the recent acquisition by Siemens will mean for Mentor. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: A year ago it looked as if the entire industry was going to b... » read more

Tools To Design CNNs


Convolutional neural networks are becoming a mainstay in machine learning and artificial intelligence, allowing a network of distributed sensors to collect data and send them to a central brain for processing. This is a relatively simple idea in comparison to today's technology, and the idea of the [getkc id="261" kc_name="convolutional neural network"] has been around for some time. But bui... » read more

Portable Stimulus Status Report


The first release of the Portable Stimulus (PS) standard is slated for early next year. If it lives up to its promise, it could be the first new language and abstraction for verification in two decades. [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] uncorked the PS Early Adopter release at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June. The standard has been more than two years in the making by t... » read more

Executive Insight: Aart de Geus


Aart de Geus, chairman and co-CEO of [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss machine learning and big data, the race toward autonomous vehicles, systems vs. chips, software vs. hardware, and the future of EDA. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The whole tech world is buzzing over data and how it gets used in areas such as... » read more

Is Design Innovation Slowing?


Paul Teich, principal analyst for Tirias Research, gave a provocative talk at the recent DAC conference entitled, "Is Integration Leaving Less Room for Design Innovation?" The answer isn't as simple as the question might suggest. "Integration used to be a driver for increasing the functionality of silicon," Teich said. "Increasingly, it will be used to incorporate more features of an entire ... » read more

IP Business Changing As Markets Shift


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IP protection, tracking and reuse with Srinath Anantharaman, CEO of [getentity id="22203" e_name="ClioSoft"]; and Jeff Galloway, CTO of Silicon Creations; Marc Greenberg, group director of product marketing for [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]'s IP Group; and John Koeter, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"... » read more

Using Machine Learning In EDA


Machine learning is beginning to have an impact on the EDA tools business, cutting the cost of designs by allowing tools to suggest solutions to common problems that would take design teams weeks or even months to work through. This reduces the cost of designs. It also potentially expands the market for EDA tools, opening the door to even new design starts and more chips from more compan... » read more

CCIX Enables Machine Learning


It takes a lot of technology to enable something like machine learning, and not all of it is as glamorous as neural network architectures and algorithms. Several levels below that is the actual hardware on which these run, and that brings us into the even less sexy world of interfaces. One such interface, the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX), pronounced C6, aims to make th... » read more

Improving VHDL


For the past several years, I have had the privilege to chair the IEEE 1076 VHDL working group. In March, we handed off the revisions to the VHDL LRM to our technical editor to finalize the document for balloting. As we are waiting for the standards process to finish up, I thought I would share my favorite new additions. Let me start with an executive summary: VHDL-2017 plus Open Source VHDL... » read more

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