Debug: Last Bastion Of Automation


There have been a number of times when anecdotal evidence became folk law and then over time, the effort was put in to find out whether there was any truth in it. Perhaps the most famous case is the statement that verification consumes 70% of development time and resources. For years this “fact” was used in almost every verification presentation and yet nobody knew where the number had come... » read more

Tech Talk: Double-Triple Patterning


Mentor Graphics' David Abercrombie shows the differences and challenges in double patterning versus triple patterning. [youtube vid= e0wZmjBbEf0] » read more

Predictions For 2016: Markets


Seventeen companies sent in their predictions for this year with some of them sending predictions from several people. This is in addition to the CEO predictions that were recently published. That is a fine crop of views for the coming year, especially since they know that they will be held accountable for their views and this year, just like the last, they will have to answer for them. We beli... » read more

One On One: John Lee


John Lee, general manager and vice president of Ansys—and the former CEO of data analytics firm Gear Design Solutions, which Ansys acquired in September—sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how big data techniques can be used in semiconductor and system design. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What's your goal now that Gear has been acquired by [getent... » read more

What Goes Wrong With IP


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the future of IP with Rob Aitken, R&D fellow at [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"]; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]; Judd Heape, vice president of product applications at Apical; and Bernard Murphy, an independent industry consultant. What follows are excerpts of that discussion, which... » read more

EDA, IP Numbers Strong


EDA and IP sales were 7.1% in Q3 across all major segments and all geographical regions, increasing to $1.957 billion compared with $1.828 billion in the same period in 2014, according to just-released numbers from the EDA Consortium. The four-quarter moving average was up 8.8%. "This was an excellent quarter for EDA," said Wally Rhines, board sponsor for the EDA Consortium's Market Statisti... » read more

How To Reduce Timing Closure Headaches


As chips have become more complex, timing closure has provided some of the most vexing challenges facing design engineers today. This step requires an increasing amount of time to complete and adds significantly to design costs and back-end schedule risks. Wire delay dominates transistor switching delay Building high-performance modern CPUs involves pipelining to achieve high frequencies. I... » read more

Intento Design


While the United States is where most EDA developments have come from, there have been pockets of success at various places around the world and one that has produced more than most in recent years in France. Semiconductor Engineering spoke with [getperson id=" 11759 " comment ="Ramy Iskander"], founder and CEO and Eric Laurent, worldwide sales and business development for [getentity id="22905"... » read more

Mobile Market Dynamics Are Changing


Ever since the introduction of the iPhone in June 2007, increasingly advanced SoCs have dominated the semiconductor supply chain, from tools to design houses to foundries. Android's introduction in 2010 only cemented the market. Together they created massive demand for power-efficient chips that were dark most of the time, feature-rich, and which could respond within milliseconds to any command... » read more

New Approaches To Low Power Design


While Moore's Law continues to drive feature size reduction and complexity, a whole separate part of the industry is growing up around vertical markets in the IoT. While these two worlds may be different in many respects, they share one thing in common—low power design is critical to success. How engineering teams minimize power in each of these markets, and even within the same market, ca... » read more

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