Startup Funding: July 2020


A number of semiconductor and design companies took in funding this month, from a mega round for a data center switch maker to seed grants for two Canadian companies and new funding for an IP marketplace. China continues to be a hot area for electric vehicles, with one company raising half a billion for its two models currently in production. For July, we highlight fifteen startups that raised ... » read more

CodaCache: Helping to Break the Memory Wall


As artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicle systems have grown in complexity, system performance needs have begun to conflict with latency and power consumption requirements. This dilemma is forcing semiconductor engineers to re-architect their system-on-chip (SoC) designs to provide more scalable levels of performance, flexibility, efficiency, and integration. From the edge to data ... » read more

EDA Forms The Basis For Designing Secure Systems


By Adam Cron and Brandon Wang As Internet of Things (IoT) devices rapidly increase in popularity and deployment, security risks are arising at all levels. It could be at the usability level such as social engineering, pretexting, phishing; at the primitive level such as cryptanalysis; at the software level such as client-side scripting, code injection; and now even at the hardware level. Dur... » read more

IP Integration Verification At DVClub Europe


Most people involved in pre-silicon verification of digital designs and electronic design automation (EDA) know the folks at Test and Verification Solutions (T&VS – now acquired by Tessolve to offer a full VLSI and test service). Among other things, they organize the Verification Futures (VF) conference in the UK and the DVClub Europe meetings. These are highly technical events, with plen... » read more

Power Impact At The Physical Layer Causes Downstream Effects


Data movement is rapidly emerging as one of the top design challenges, and it is being complicated by new chip architectures and physical effects caused by increasing density at advanced nodes and in multi-chip systems. Until the introduction of the latest revs of high-bandwidth memory, as well as GDDR6, memory was considered the next big bottleneck. But other compute bottlenecks have been e... » read more

An Automotive Value Chain In Flux


When companies view suppliers from inside their specialized niches, it is tempting to imagine the business world will continue as-is, with just minimal improvements each year. But in the automotive value chain, this no longer holds. The rapid pace of innovation around intelligent systems in cars is disrupting the business flow. Back in simpler times, semiconductor companies would work with Tier... » read more

Gaps Emerging In System Integration


The system integration challenge is evolving, but existing tools and methods are not keeping up with the task. New tools and flows are needed to handle global concepts, such as power and thermal, that cannot be dealt with at the block level. As we potentially move into a new era where IP gets delivered as physical pieces of silicon, this lack of an accepted flow will become a stumbling block. ... » read more

The Fast, ‘Attractive’ Path From Great PPA To The Best PPA For High-Performance Arm Cores


By Mark Richards and Neel Desai When you want to create a website for your new side-hustle, or maybe for your local soccer team, it's rare that you would order a book on cascading-style sheets, break out the HTML editor and start from a blank sheet of “paper.” You'd do the smart thing and use a website builder, link it to some content management tool (this would get you to 90% of a usabl... » read more

Open-Source Hardware Momentum Builds


Open-source hardware continues to gain ground, spearheaded by RISC-V — despite the fact that this processor technology is neither free nor simple to use. Nevertheless, the open-source hardware movement has established a solid foothold after multiple prior forays that yielded only limited success, even for processors. With demand for more customized hardware, and a growing field of startups... » read more

Fundamental Changes In Economics Of Chip Security


Protecting chips from cyberattacks is becoming more difficult, more expensive and much more resource-intensive, but it also is becoming increasingly necessary as some of those chips end up in mission-critical servers and in safety-critical applications such as automotive. Security has been on the semiconductor industry's radar for at least the past several years, despite spotty progress and ... » read more

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