Engineers Or Their Tools: Which Is Responsible For Finding Bugs?


Experts at the table: Finding and eliminating bugs at the source can be painstaking work, but it can prevent bigger problems later in the design flow, when they are more difficult and expensive to fix.  Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Ashish Darbari, CEO at Axiomise; Ziyad Hanna, corporate vice president R&D at Cadence; Jim Henson, ASIC verification software... » read more

Complex Safety Mechanisms Require Interoperability And Automation For Validation And Metric Closure


The race to autonomous mobility among the automobile manufacturers is driving the evolution of the underlying semiconductors. As a result, semiconductor technologies are moving towards higher densities and lower operating voltages, and this migration is introducing increasing sensitivity to random hardware failures – the failures which occur unpredictably over a semiconductor’s lifetime. Mo... » read more

FPGA-Based HW/SW Platform For Pre-Silicon Emulation Of RISC-V Designs (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)


A technical paper titled “Makinote: An FPGA-Based HW/SW Platform for Pre-Silicon Emulation of RISC-V Designs” was published by researchers at Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Abstract: "Emulating chip functionality before silicon production is crucial, especially with the increasing prevalence of RISC-V-based designs. FPGAs are promising candidate... » read more

The Challenge And Value Proposition of eFPGA Emulation


More than 40 chips have been licensed to use EFLX eFPGA and more than 20 chips are already working in silicon. Big customers like Renesas are planning high volumes and families of chips using eFPGA. eFPGA is being used in process nodes from 180nm to 5nm, with 3nm and 18A in evaluation. Especially for the high-volume customers working in advanced finFET nodes, the strong need is for first ... » read more

Industry Pressure Grows For Simulating Systems Of Systems


Most complex systems are designed in a top-down manner, but as the amount of electronic content in those systems increases, so does the pressure on the chip industry to provide high-level models and simulation capabilities. Those models either do not exist today, or they exist in isolation. No matter how capable a model or simulator, there never will be one that can do it all. In some cases,... » read more

Designing Vehicles Virtually


The shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), electric vehicles (EVs), and ultimately autonomous vehicles (AVs) is proving the value and exposing the weaknesses in simulating individual components and complete vehicles. The ability to model this intensely complex maze of real-world interactions and possible scenarios is improving, and it's happening faster than comparable road-testing o... » read more

AI, Rising Chip Complexity Complicate Prototyping


Prototyping, an essential technology for designing complex chips in tight market windows, is becoming significantly more challenging for the growing number of designs that include AI/ML. Prototyping remains one of the foundational pillars of the whole shift left movement, allowing software to be developed and tested before actual silicon is available. That, in turn, enables multiple teams t... » read more

Chips Getting More Secure, But Not Quickly Enough


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the impact of heterogeneous integration, more advanced RISC-V designs, and a growing awareness of security threats, with Mike Borza, Synopsys scientist; John Hallman, product manager for trust and security at Siemens EDA; Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketin... » read more

Hardware-Accelerated RTL Simulator


A technical paper titled "Manticore: Hardware-Accelerated RTL Simulation with Static Bulk-Synchronous Parallelism" was published by researchers at EPFL, University of Tokyo, Sharif University, and Indian Institute of Technology. Abstract "The demise of Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling has revived interest in specialized computer architectures and accelerators. Verification and testing of thi... » read more

Emulation System for Racetrack Memories Based on FPGA


A technical paper titled "ERMES: Efficient Racetrack Memory Emulation System based on FPGA" was written by researchers at University of Calabria and TU Dresden. "This paper presents a new emulation system for RTMs based on heterogeneous FPGA-CPU Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). Thanks to its high flexibility, the proposed emulator can be easily configured to evaluate different memory architectures. ... » read more

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