A High-Level ‘How To’ Guide For Effective Chip-Package Thermal Co-Design


By John Parry and Byron Blackmore Concurrent design of a chip and its packaging environment is becoming more important than ever for several reasons. Designing a large, high power die, e.g. a System-on-Chip (SoC), without considering how to get the heat out is likely to lead to problems later on, resulting in a sub-optimal packaging solution from cost, size, weight and performance perspective... » read more

Power Moves Up To First Place


Virtually every presentation delivered about semiconductor design or manufacturing these days—and every end product specification that uses advanced technology—incorporates some reference to power and/or energy. It has emerged as the most persistent, most problematic, and certainly the most talked about issue from conception to marketplace adoption. And the conversation only grows louder... » read more

Pain Management


In part one of this series, the focus was on overlapping and new pain points in the semiconductor flow, from initial conception of what needs to be in a chip all the way through to manufacturing. Part two looks at how companies are attempting to manage that pain. It’s no secret that [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]s are getting more complicated to design, debug and build, but the complexity i... » read more

Blog Review: April 9


Mentor’s Colin Walls discovered an interesting video of the software programming learning process—a teacher responding literally to commands from his students on how to make a jam sandwich. It’s harder than it looks. Cadence’s Brian Fuller captures a speech by his colleague, Sanjiv Taneja, about the need for a comprehensive verification approach and smart IP reuse. The overriding th... » read more

Reliability In Networking And Telecom Systems


The main source of heat in electronic equipment is their semiconductor chips, and the temperature sensitivities of these chips presents a challenge in designing cooling solutions. Overheating causes the chips to prematurely fail—and failure of only one chip can disable the entire equipment, the higher the chip temperature, the earlier and more certain the failure. As functionality has increas... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics rolled out a new platform for verification of unknown voltage levels (Xs) at the register transfer and gate levels, fusing together simulation and formal verification under one umbrella. The company says the approach will limit bugs and wasted effort caused by X-optimism and pessimism. Jasper Design Automation unveiled a new tool to verify the sequential functional equ... » read more

Blog Review: April 2


Mentor’s Nazita Saye compares roadway roundabouts to networked systems. One roundabout works fine, but add in a bunch of them and you have a massive traffic jam. How many roundabouts are in your design? Cadence’s Richard Goering interviews Stan Kroliskoski, chair of the IEEE Design Automation Standards Committee, about four working groups on EDA standards and what’s ahead. Speaking ... » read more

EDA Sales Up Again


EDA continued to post strong growth, setting records as an industry and proving the resilience of the tools industry, which has been showing positive numbers for 16 consecutive quarters. Revenue for Q4 of 2013 were $1.881 billion, up from $1.779 billion in the same period in 2012, according to numbers provided by the EDA Consortium. For the year, revenue hit $6.932 billion, up 6.1% from annu... » read more

Tech Talk: Multipatterning, Take Two


Mentor Graphics' David Abercrombie continues with his whiteboard talk about coloring with advanced lithography, including what goes wrong and how to fix it. [youtube vid=HCBtvHCcbf4] » read more

Big Shift In SoC Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss software-driven verification with Ken Knowlson, principal engineer at Intel; Mark Olen, product manager for the Design Verification Technology Division of Mentor Graphics; Steve Chappell, senior manager for CAE technology and verification at Synopsys; Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System Development Suite at Cadenc... » read more

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