Chip Dis-Integration


Just because something can be done does not always mean that it should be done. One segment of the semiconductor industry is learning the hard way that continued chip integration has a significant downside. At the same time, another another group has just started to see the benefits of consolidating functionality onto a single substrate. Companies that have been following Moore's Law and hav... » read more

Commoditizing Constraints


Preparing articles for Semiconductor Engineering involves talking to a lot of people and then trying to fit their statements together in a way that is logical and fair. Sometimes a subject will come up in one of these calls that is not really on topic, but is still interesting. One such incident happened this week while doing research for the Verification 3.0 article. The topic was constrain... » read more

Making Declarative Modeling Modular: Portable Stimulus Introduces Dynamic Constraints


Naturally, Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) supports the powerful capabilities of advanced verification techniques that are well-known in the industry today, including object-oriented composition and constrained-random stimulus. But the PSS also supports a new constraint capability, called dynamic constraints. Dynamic constraints support the critical mission of the PSS by makin... » read more

Hidden Costs Of Shifting Left


The term "Shift Left" has been used increasingly within the semiconductor development flow to indicate tasks that were once performed sequentially must now be done concurrently. This is usually due to a tightening of dependences between tasks. One such example being talked about today is the need to perform hardware/software integration much earlier in the flow, rather than leaving it as a sequ... » read more

Different Shades Of Prototyping And Ecosystems: System Development At CDNLive 2018


Because of its unique great user interactions, my favorite EDA event of the year is the kickoff of our yearly series of CDNLive user conferences in Silicon Valley. This year blew out all my expectations. We had a dozen presentations in the Systems Track that I was sharing, 11 of them from customers and partners underlining the use model versatility of emulation, the hardware ecosystem for 5G, a... » read more

Abstracting Abstracter Abstractions In Functional Verification


I heard a clear three-part message during DVCon at the end of February: verification engineers must abstractly embrace the abstract idea of abstracting abstract abstraction through higher levels of abstraction; we overuse the word abstract to emphasize the value of whatever verification technique we happen to be talking about; and the key to new abstractions is using Portable Stimulu... » read more

Verification And Validation Brothers


At DVCon this year, Doug Amos took the stage for the [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"] sponsored lunch presentation. For those of you who were there but decided to skip the lunch, expecting the traditional forced sales pitch, you made a mistake. Amos is one of those rare people who know how to inject humor, teaching and marketing into a single presentation such that the... » read more

Can Big Data Help Coverage Closure?


Semiconductor designs are a combination of very large numbers and very small numbers. There is a large numbers of transistors at very small sizes, and databases are often large. The chip industry has been looking at [getkc id="305" kc_name="machine learning"] to effectively manage some of this data, but so far datasets have not been properly tagged across the industry and there is a reluctan... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Microchip inked an agreement to acquire Microsemi, provider of chips for defense and aerospace, for $68.78 per share in cash. The acquisition price represents a total equity value of about $8.35 billion and a total enterprise value of about $10.15 billion, according to Microchip. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2018. Silvaco acquired NanGate. Founded in 2004, ... » read more

Executive Insight: Wally Rhines (March 2018)


Wally Rhines, president and CEO of [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss a wide range of industry and technology changes and how that will play out over the next few years. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What will happen in the end markets? Rhines: The end markets are perhaps more exciting from a... » read more

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