3D IC Supply Chain: Still Under Construction

By Barbara Jorgensen - 25 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 1

By Barbara Jorgensen and Ed Sperling Stacked die, which promise high levels of integration, a tiny footprint, energy conservation and blinding speed, still have some big hurdles to overcome. Cost, packaging and manufacturability continue to make steady progress, with test chips being produced by all of the major foundries. But in a disaggregated ecosystem, the supply chain remains a big st... » read more

Raising The IP Abstraction Level

By Ed Sperling - 25 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling An increasing reliance on commercial and re-used IP and more emphasis placed on software development is adding even more pressure onto semiconductor design teams to figure out the benefits and limitations of myriad possible choices earlier in the design process. Design teams already are under pressure to meet increasingly tighter market deadlines, and it is stressing every pa... » read more

System-Level Security Issues

By Ed Sperling - 25 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

The more things that are put onto a single SoC, the greater the possibility that the entire system can be hacked. Centralization is good from the standpoint of speed, cost and power, but it’s not always good from the standpoint of security. This may sound contrary to the experience of corporate IT departments, but there’s a reason behind this. In the case of data centers, the advent of t... » read more

The Week In Review: July 19

By Ed Sperling - 19 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Synopsys rolled out a 28nm data converter IP portfolio for analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, as well as integrated PLLs. Synopsys says the new architecture saves up to 76% of the power and 86% of area. Mentor Graphics added intelligent software-driven verification to its functional verification platform. New is the ability to automatically generate embedded ... » read more

Changes And Challenges

By Ed Sperling - 18 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

At 130nm, the shift to copper interconnects and 300mm wafer sizes was considered to be the most difficult transition in its long and incredibly efficient history. The next chapter will be even tougher. It’s not that change is a foreign concept to semiconductor design and manufacturing. In fact, it’s probably the only constant over the past 50 years. But in the past, those changes tended ... » read more

The Integrated IP Subsystem: A Converging SoC Solution

By Various Writers - 11 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

The consumer device market is witnessing incredible market space convergence between mobile handheld, automotive, and home electronics. IP vendors, engineers, and system design engineers face a multitude of challenges when designing and developing ICs, systems, or subsystems for the next great portable device. The next cell phone for instance, will not only be a multimedia player, but also a de... » read more

Faster IP Integration

By Ed Sperling - 03 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down with Laurent Moll, chief technology officer at Arteris, to talk about interoperability, complexity and integration issues. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: What’s the big challenge with IP? Moll: Interoperability is always a concern. Because of ARM’s dominance, a lot of people are moving to AMBA protocols, whether that’... » read more

Experts At The Table: Performance Analysis

By Ed Sperling - 28 Jun, 2013 - Comments: 0

Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down with Ravi Kalyanaraman, senior verification manager for the digital entertainment business unit at Marvell; William Orme, strategic marketing manager for ARM’s System IP and Processor Division; Steve Brown, product marketing and business development director for the systems and software group at Cadence; Johannes Stahl director of product market... » read more

De-Mystifying The SoC Supply Chain

By Ed Sperling - 27 Jun, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Barbara Jorgensen At the heart of every supply chain operation is the desire to mitigate risk. In theory, a supply chain allows a customer to leverage the best of the best in technology, logistics or production at a lower cost than DIY (do it yourself.) The system on chip (SoC) supply chain is no different—there’s a whole ecosystem in the semiconductor industry that supports design, pro... » read more

Faster Assembly Required

By Ed Sperling - 27 Jun, 2013 - Comments: 0

Speeding up production has been a mantra dating back throughout recorded history, and presumably well before that. That’s what technology was created for—roads, bridges aqueducts, computers, the Internet, and everything that connects the real to the virtual world. A speech by Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally at DAC that complex SoCs should only take a couple weeks to design by two guys ... » read more

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