RISC-V Verification Challenges Spread


The RISC-V ecosystem is struggling to keep pace with rapid innovation and customization, which is increasing the amount of verification work required for each design and spreading that work out across more engineers at more companies. The historical assumption is that verification represents 60% to 80% or more of SoC project effort in terms of cost and time for a mature, mainstream processor... » read more

Open Source Vs. Commercial RISC-V Licensing Models


Everybody is familiar with commercial licensing from traditional processor IP vendors such as Arm, Cadence, and Synopsys. But in discussing the RISC-V Open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), there is widespread confusion of terminology with RISC-V often being described as “open source.” Some have even accused vendors of commercial RISC-V IP such as Codasip or Andes as not being in the spir... » read more

How 5G Is Influencing Silicon Design


5G is introducing a wide array of challenges in next-generation SoCs that go well beyond high bandwidth wireless. These include increasing system bandwidth, lowering SoC latency, and reducing power significantly for the connected internet of things. Using trusted standards-based IP and proven processing and analog IP at the most aggressive process technology nodes is needed to bring 5G to marke... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


RISC-V RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond provided an update on the state of the community during the annual RISC-V Summit: “RISC-V has had an incredible year of growth and momentum. This year, our technical community has grown 66 percent to more than 2,300 individuals in our more than 50 technical and special interest groups. We’re seeing increased market momentum of RISC-V cores, S... » read more

IP Safe Enough To Use In Cars


IP that is used for functional safety needs to respond to events that can happen, whether those are planned or random. Jody Defazio, vice president of IP quality and functional safety at Synopsys, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about ASIL compliance, what the different levels mean, and the impact of using chips developed at the most advanced process nodes in automotive applications. » read more

Change Management With Impact Analysis During Safety-Critical IP And SoC Development


Standards like ISO 26262 provide guidance to mitigate safety risks by defining safety analyses requirements and processes. The standard describes Change Management as a way to analyze and control changes in safety-related work products, items, and elements throughout the safety lifecycle. Impact analysis, a part of the Change Management process, is a systematic approach for evaluating changes t... » read more

Designs Beyond The Reticle Limit


Designs continue to grow in size and complexity, but today they are reaching both physical and economic challenges. These challenges are causing a reversal of the integration trend that has provided much of the performance and power gains over the past couple of decades. The industry, far from giving up, is exploring new ways to enable designs to go beyond the reticle size, which is around 8... » read more

The Benefits Of Using Embedded Sensing Fabrics In AI Devices


AI chips, regardless of the application, are not regular ASICs and tend to be very large, this essentially means that AI chips are reaching the reticle limits in-terms of their size. They are also usually dominated by an array of regular structures and this helps to mitigate yield issues by building in tolerance to defect density due to the sheer number of processor blocks. The reason behind... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Cadence debuted System-Level Verification IP (System VIP), a suite of tools and libraries for automating SoC testbench assembly, bus and CPU traffic generation, cache-coherency validation, and system performance bottleneck analysis. Tests created using the System VIP solution are portable across Cadence simulation, emulation and prototyping engines and can also be extended to po... » read more

EDA, IP Show Surprising Strength


EDA and IP revenue surged 12.6% in Q2 to $2.78 billion, up from $2.47 billion in the same period in 2019, according to a just-released report. That growth occurred in all regions, as well. What's surprising about the report is just how strong sales were in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. "Revenue was up strongly from Q1, and there was enormous growth," said Wally Rhines, executive spo... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →