Design Reuse Vs. Abstraction


Chip designers have been constantly searching for a hardware description language abstraction level higher than RTL for a few decades. But not everyone is moving in that direction, and there appear to be enough options available through design reuse to forestall that shift for many chipmakers. Pushing to new levels of abstraction is frequent topic of discussion in the design world, particula... » read more

The Darker Side Of Consolidation


Another wave of consolidation is underway in the semiconductor industry, setting the stage for some high-stakes competitive battles over market turf and sowing confusion across the supply chain about continued support throughout a product's projected lifetime. The consolidation comes as chipmakers already are grappling with rising complexity, the loss of a roadmap for future designs as Moore... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A MIPS has reportedly been acquired again, this time by AI startup Wave Computing. Wave focuses on data center-based neural network training using its parallel dataflow processing architecture. In March, the company signed on to use 64-bit multi-threaded processor cores from MIPS in future projects. Previously, MIPS was owned by Tallwood Venture Capital, which acquired MIPS from Imaginat... » read more

CEO Outlook On Chip Industry (Part 1)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics; and Dean Drako, CEO of IC Manage. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. L-R: Dean Drako, Grant Pierce, Wally Rhines, Simon Segars. Photo: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance SE: What are the big changes ahead, and where do you see th... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A ANSYS finalized its acquisition of OPTIS. Founded in 1989, OPTIS provided software for scientific simulation of light, human vision and physics-based visualization. The acquisition boosts the company's automotive simulation portfolio with radar, lidar and camera simulation. Terms were not disclosed. IP Arm debuted the Cortex-M35P processor. Aimed at IoT applications, the IP combine... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Arm unveiled a new suite of IP focused on machine learning for edge devices. Currently dubbed Project Trillium, it includes the Arm ML processor, the second-generation Arm Object Detection (OD) processor, and open-source Arm NN software. The ML processor provides more than 4.6 TOPs in mobile environments with efficiency of 3 TOPs/W. People detection is a focus of the OD processo... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Products/Services At this week’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, Amazon Web Services introduced a number of products and services for the Internet of Things, machine learning, and other areas. These include Amazon FreeRTOS (an operating system for IoT microcontrollers), AWS IoT Device Defender (security management), AWS IoT 1-Click, AWS IoT Device Management, AWS IoT Analytics... » read more

Safety Plus Security: A New Challenge


Nobody has ever integrated safety or security features into their design just because they felt like it. Usually, successive high-profile attacks are needed to even get an industry's attention. And after that, it's not always clear how to best implement solutions or what the tradeoffs are between cost, performance, and risk versus benefit. Putting safety and security in the same basket is a ... » read more

RISC-V Pros And Cons


Simpler, faster, lower-power hardware with a free, open, simple instruction set architecture? While it sounds too good to be true, efforts are underway to do just that with RISC-V, the instruction-set architecture (ISA) developed by UC Berkeley engineers and now administered by a foundation. It has been known for some time that with [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] not offering the same... » read more

Electric Vehicles Set The Pace


Electric vehicles are leading the charge for innovation in automotive electronics. Companies that invested and embraced the challenge of EVs are besting their less-nimble, less-open-minded engineering cohorts. Semiconductors and embedded computers have been controlling the dashboard, mirrors, seats, heating and cooling for years. But with EVs, engineering teams are starting to tackle tas... » read more

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