The Beginning


We all want our creations to transcend time. Our products, our designs—even our specifications. Specifications are more than just ideas or collections of requirements or static collections of implementation details. They live inside many chips and many designs, and the more flexible and portable they are, the longer they remain relevant. End devices may be replaced relatively quickly, but ... » read more

Reflections On 2015


It is easy to make predictions, but few people can make them with any degree of accuracy. Most of the time, those predictions are forgotten by the end of the year and there is no one to do a tally of who holds more credibility for next year. Not so with SemiEngineering. We like to hold people's feet to the fire, but while the Pants-On-Fire meter may be applicable to politicians, we like to thin... » read more

Hardware Models For Software


Shift left, while a relatively new term, has become important in all parts of the SoC design flow, but its impacts are wide ranging and many still ill defined. It basically means that tasks have to be started earlier than in the past because more accuracy is required from tasks that are further down in the flow in order to make better predictions. It also implies that more steps are performed c... » read more

One Flow To Rule Them All


The new mantra of shift left within EDA is nothing new and first made an appearance more than a decade ago. At that time there was a very large divide between logic synthesis and place and route. As wire delays became more important, timing closure became increasingly difficult with a logic synthesis flow that did not take that into account. The tools subsequently became tied much closer togeth... » read more

Can IP Integration Be Automated?


What exactly does it mean to automate [getkc id="43" comment="IP"] integration? Ask four people in the industry and you’ll get four different answers. “The key issue is how you can assemble the hardware as quickly as you can out of pre-made pieces of IP,” said Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of [getentity id="22674" e_name="Arteris"]. To Simon Rance, senior product manager in the ... » read more

Making Hardware Design More Agile


Semiconductor engineering sat down to whether changes are needed in hardware design methodology, with Philip Gutierrez, ASIC/FPGA design manager in [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"]'s FlashSystems Storage Group; Dennis Brophy, director of strategic business development at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System ... » read more

IP Verification Challenges


At the Design Automation Conference this year, the Designer and IP tracks were the stars of the show in many ways. These sessions catered to industry rather than academia and provided engineers with information they could directly use in their jobs. Many of the sessions were filled to capacity and Anne Cirkel, general chair for the 52nd DAC, was enthusiastic about the growing success of these t... » read more

Prototyping To Help You Win The Battle


Lately, my children and I are closely following a new show on ABC called “Battlebots”. The concept is as simple as it is cool—have a massive bulletproof arena where two remote-controlled robots battle it out until one is knocked out or the time is up (and a jury decides the winner). The battles are all about making physical contact with the other robot to either directly deal them damage ... » read more

Rethinking Manufacturing Models


The perennial uncertainty surrounding EUV lithography and complications stemming from the most advanced nodes are creating a domino effect across the semiconductor industry. Rather than stalling the market, though, which is what happened with the transition to 20nm, vendors now are accelerating their product rollouts and adjusting business plans to capitalize on those delays. That includes m... » read more

The Fill Ecosystem Evolves Again


Several years ago, we wrote about the ecosystem of fill, and how 20nm technology required a much tighter relationship between the foundry, designers and EDA vendors. While the players remain the same, there have been some interesting shifts in fill techniques and usage as designers move to even-smaller technologies. What continues with each node is the additional complexity of the design flo... » read more

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