Verification Of Functional Safety


Functional safety is becoming a key part of chip design, and an increasingly problematic one for many engineering teams. Functional safety for electrical and electronic systems is nothing new. It has been an important element of the military, aerospace and medical industries for many years. But the growing importance of functional safety within the automobile industry presents a number o... » read more

Predictions: Methodologies And Tools


Predictions are divided into four posts this year. Part one covered markets and drivers. The second part looked at manufacturing, devices and companies and this part will cover methodologies and tools. In addition, the outlook from EDA executives will be provided in a separate post. Intellectual property As designs get larger, it should be no surprise that the size of the [getkc id="43" kc_... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance VDOO Connected Trust received $13 million in seed funding led by 83North, with participation by Dell Technology Capital and individual investors David Strohm, Joe Tucci, and Victor Tsao. The startup offers Internet of Things device developers the capability to add cybersecurity features to those devices after they’re deployed. VDOO was founded last year in Israel by Netanel Davidi, U... » read more

Predictions: Manufacturing, Devices And Companies


Some predictions are just wishful thinking, but most of these are a lot more thoughtful. They project what needs to happen for various markets or products to become successful. Those far reaching predictions may not fully happen within 2018, but we give everyone the chance to note the progress made towards their predictions at the end of the year. (See Reflection On 2017: Design And EDA and Man... » read more

EDA, IP Sales Up 8%


The EDA sector continues to exhibit solid growth, increasing 8% to $2.2262 billion in Q3, up from $2.0937 billion in the same period in 2016, according to the most recent stats from the ESD Alliance Market Statistics Service. The four-quarter moving average was up 11.5%, year over year. While all of the numbers were up, two areas showed extraordinary growth. One involved Japan, which showed ... » read more

Turning Down The Power


Chip and system designers are giving greater weight to power issues these days. But will they inevitably hit a wall in accounting for ultra-low-power considerations? Performance, power, and area are the traditional attributes in chip design. Area was originally the main priority, with feature sizes constantly shrinking according to Moore's Law. Performance was in the saddle for many years. M... » read more

Could Liquid IP Lead To Better Chips? (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the benefits that could come from making IP available as abstract blocks instead of RTL implementations with Mark Johnstone, technical director for Electronic Design Automation for [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"] Semiconductor; [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], CTO at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; Bryan Bowyer, director of ... » read more

Mixed-Signal Issues Worse At 10/7nm


Despite increasingly difficulty in scaling digital logic to 10/7nm, not all designs at the leading edge are digital. In fact, there are mixed-signal components in designs at almost all nodes down to 10/7nm. This may seem surprising because analog scaling has been an issue since about 90nm, but these are not traditional analog components. Analog IP increasingly includes highly integrated, mix... » read more

Reflection On 2017: Design And EDA


People love to make predictions, and most of the time they have it easy, but at Semiconductor Engineering, we ask them to look back on the predictions they make each year and to assess how close to the mark they were. We see what they missed and what surprised them. Not everyone accepts our offer to grade themselves, but most have this year. (Part one looked at the predictions associated with s... » read more

Is Verification Falling Behind?


Every year that [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] is in effect means that the [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"] task gets larger and more complex. At one extreme, verification complexity increases at the square of design complexity, but that assumes that every state in the design is usable and unique. On the other hand, verification has not had the luxury that comes with design reuse b... » read more

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