Is There A Crossover Point For Mainstream Anymore?


Until 28nm, it was generally assumed that process nodes would go mainstream one or two generations after they were introduced. So by the time the leading edge chips for smartphones and servers were being developed at 16/14nm and 10/7nm, it was assumed that developing a chip at 28nm would be less expensive, less complex, and that the process rule deck would shrink. That worked for decades. Th... » read more

RISC-V Markets, Security And Growth Prospects


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss open instruction set hardware with Ben Levine, senior director of product management in Rambus' Security Division; Jerry Ardizzone, vice president of worldwide sales at Codasip; Megan Wachs, vice president of engineering at SiFive; and Rishiyur Nikhil, CTO of Bluespec. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.  Part one of this discussion is ... » read more

Power Complexity On The Rise


New chip architectures and custom applications are adding significant challenges to chip design and verification, and the problems are becoming much more complex as low power is added into the mix. Power always has been a consideration in design, but in the past it typically involved different power domains that were either on, off, or in some level of sleep mode. As hardware architectures s... » read more

Addressing Pain Points In Chip Design


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of multi-physics and new market applications on chip design with John Lee, general manager and vice president of ANSYS' Semiconductor Business Unit; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx, Duane Boning, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT; and Thomas Harms, director EDA/IP Alliance at Infineon. What foll... » read more

Verdi Transaction Debug Solution: Unified Performance Analysis And Debug For Interconnect


In modern systems on chip (SoCs), where Arm AMBA protocols are intensively used as standard intellectual property (IP) interfaces, the interconnect is usually required to bridge and facilitate the communication between many different IP interfaces. The interconnect presents one of the biggest challenges of SoC verification, considering the different kinds of protocol interfaces, conversion of d... » read more

A Breakthrough In Silicon Bring-Up


The current semiconductor market is seeing increasingly complex silicon devices for applications like 5G wireless communications, autonomous driving, and artificial intelligence. One of the ways designers are working to control design time and cost is through the adoption of IJTAG (IEEE 1687) for a plug-and-play style IP integration during design. The benefits of using IJTAG are still emerging,... » read more

Leveraging Data In Chipmaking


John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the impact of data analytics on everything from yield and reliability to the inner structure of organizations, how the cloud and edge will work together, and where the big threats are in the future. SE: When did you recognize that data would be so critical to hardware design and manufact... » read more

Traceability Of Functional Safety Requirements In Automotive IP And SoCs


By Shivakumar Chonnad, Vladimir Litovtchenko, and Rohit Bhardwaj Developing functional safety systems, including all the components such as the system-on-chip (SoC) and IP, hinges on the ability to meet the stringent automotive functional safety requirements such as definition, implementation, verification, and validation. Depending on the Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL), the functi... » read more

Service Revenue Growing With Chip Complexity


Rising complexity, new markets, and a shortage of in-house expertise are beginning to rekindle demand for services for the first time in nearly a decade. The semiconductor industry has been racing to design chips for a variety of new and existing applications, but they are facing challenges on a number of fronts: Leading-edge chips require new architectures due to a sharp reduction in s... » read more

Migrating 3D Into The Mainstream


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for ANSYS' Semiconductor Business Unit; John Park, product management director for IC packaging and cross-platform solutions at Cadence; John Ferguson, director of marketing for DRC applications at Mentor, a Siemens Business;... » read more

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