Chip Design Shifts As Fundamental Laws Run Out Of Steam


Dennard scaling is gone, Amdahl's Law is reaching its limit, and Moore's Law is becoming difficult and expensive to follow, particularly as power and performance benefits diminish. And while none of that has reduced opportunities for much faster, lower-power chips, it has significantly shifted the dynamics for their design and manufacturing. Rather than just different process nodes and half ... » read more

Raising IP Integration Up A Level


An increase in the number and complexity of IP blocks, coupled with changing architectures and design concerns, are driving up the need for new tools that can enable, automate, and optimize integration in advanced chips and packages. Power, security, verification and a host of other issues are cross-cutting concerns, and they make pure hierarchical approaches difficult. Adding to future comp... » read more

Addressing SRAM Verification Challenges


SureCore Limited is an SRAM IP company based in Sheffield, the United Kingdom, that develops low power memories for current and next generation silicon process technologies. Its award-winning, world-leading, low power SRAM designs are process independent and variability tolerant, making them suitable for a wide range of technology nodes. Two major product families have been announced: PowerM... » read more

EDA, IP Revenue Way Up


EDA and semiconductor IP sales grew 17.5% to $3.75 billion in Q2, the highest growth in more than a decade, fueled by more complex designs and the need for advanced design and verification tools. Demand for nearly every segment tracked in SEMI's Electronic Design Market Data (EDMD) report was up, including services, which grew 23.2% in Q2 — the most recent statistics available in. That cou... » read more

The Automotive Paradigm Shift


We are currently experiencing a pivotal moment concerning the automotive industry. Three major technology areas are converging. First, there is an enormous demand for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) coupled with the increasing trend toward autonomy. Second is the digitization and electrification of everything, which is driving the need for efficient compute. Third is the trend to high... » read more

IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

Why Every Design IP Needs A Complete QA Methodology


Design IP is a key contributor to innovation in the semiconductor industry today. As the complexity and scale of silicon designs increase, so does design and verification time. Design IP enables modularization and re-use of design components, so that designers can leverage already-existing components as a baseline to accelerate design schedules. Therefore, it is not surprising that the usage of... » read more

New Data Management Challenges


An explosion in semiconductor design and manufacturing data, and the expanding use of chips in safety-critical and mission-critical applications, is prompting chipmakers to collect and manage that data more effectively in order to improve overall performance and reliability. This collection of data reveals a number of challenges with no simple solutions. Data may be siloed and inconsistent, ... » read more

Boosting Data Management System Performance


Marios Karatzias, application engineer at ClioSoft, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the increasing use and re-use of IP in designs, how to best keep track of that IP, and how to optimize the performance of the data management system to deal with IP in heterogeneous chips. This is particularly important in automotive and industrial applications, where a specific version of IP may have... » read more

Building Trust Through Certification Of Security Solutions


Certification is all around us in our daily lives. When it comes to making decisions, we look for certain labels, stamps, and symbols indicating that products and services have been assessed or tested. If you are buying a new car, you may review NCAP (New Car Assessment Program) test results. If you are getting electrical work done at your home, you will choose a certified professional. And if ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →