Power Estimation: Early Warning System Or False Alarm?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a large panel of experts to discuss the state of power estimation and to find out if the current levels of accuracy are sufficient to being able to make informed decisions. Panelists included: Leah Schuth, director of technical marketing in the physical design group at [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"]; Vic Kulkarni, senior vice president and general m... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A Mentor Graphics acquired the rest of Calypto. In 2011, Mentor sold Calypto their high-level synthesis solution – Catapult – in exchange for 51% of the company, but left it as a fully standalone entity. Calypto will now be merged into Mentor as a standalone business unit. Tools Synopsys released its HAPS-80 FPGA-based prototyping system. According to Synopsys, the system pro... » read more

Mentor Buys Remainder Of Calypto


Back in 2002, a small startup company decided to tackle one of the most difficult problems in EDA—one that, if solved, could have opened up a whole new level of abstraction. Back when [getkc id="29" kc_name="logic synthesis"] was the new tool to try out, it suffered from the fact that gate-level [getkc id="11" kc_name="simulation"] had to be performed on the output, even if the input had been... » read more

Déjà Vu For CMP Modeling?


One definition of design for manufacturing (DFM) is providing knowledge about the impact of the manufacturing process on a design layout to the designers, so they can use that information to improve the robustness, reliability, or yield of their design before tapeout. Essentially, DFM is about designers taking ownership of the full “lifecycle” of a design, and going beyond the required desi... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 16


Ansys' Justin Nescott presents five top engineering articles for the week. Being an amateur photography buff, I start salivating at a 250 megapixel camera. Plus, origami and the art of structural engineering and a football-playing robot. Synopsys' Michael Posner provides some shocking information about the buildup of static electricity and the impact it can have on 28nm designs. Increasin... » read more

Appetite For Services Grows


Semiconductor service revenues have been growing for the past year, fueled by complex thermal and power issues at advanced nodes, the difficulty of integrating more and more IP blocks, and far more techniques, languages and methodologies that engineers need to learn to be productive in the finFET generation. The services business typically acts as a bridge between down and up cycles in the c... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Mentor Graphics rolled out a new version of its tool for transferring PCB designs into data for fabrication, assembly and test. The company also announced that its debug environment will support the UPF Low Power Successive Refinement Methodology. Deals Ansys and Cray are claiming the world's record for simulation by scaling 129,000 cores. That's about 4X the previous record.  Ansys... » read more

New Metrics For The Cloud


Data centers are beginning to adjust their definition of what makes one server better than another. Rather than comparing benchmarked performance of general-purpose servers, they are adding a new level of granularity based upon what kind of chips work best for certain operations or applications. Those decisions increasingly include everything from the level of redundancy in compute operations, ... » read more

Deciphering Performance Analysis


Simulation traditionally has been the go-to technology for improving system performance, but practices are evolving and maturing because engineering teams need to be able to simulate in multiple domains and at at multiple levels of abstraction. In addition, they need to tune the level of [getkc id="11" kc_name="simulation"] they are using to what types of models they have available, and what ki... » read more

FPGA’s Role Expands


For more than a decade FPGA vendors argued that FPGAs would become a viable alternative to ASICs, adding programmability along with the same kind of advances in performance and power that ASICs saw at each new process node. While that never played out as they expected, FPGAs nonetheless have carved out a formidable position in the semiconductor market. Generally speaking, FPGAs today are us... » read more

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