DRAM Tradeoffs: Speed Vs. Energy


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about new DRAM options and considerations with Frank Ferro, senior director of product management at Rambus; Marc Greenberg, group director for product marketing at Cadence; Graham Allan, senior product marketing manager for DDR PHYs at Synopsys; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory marketing at Samsung Electronics. What follows are excerpts of th... » read more

Signoff-Compatible CDC


Tanveer Singh, senior staff consulting applications engineer at Synopsys, explains why netlist clock domain crossing is now an essential complement to RTL CDC, why CDC issues are worse at advanced nodes and in AI chips, and why dealing with CDC effectively is becoming a competitive requirement for performance and low power. » read more

Semicon West Debrief


AI vs. energy. Quantum for everyone. Biofabrication of human organs on a mass scale. Slowing advancements from Moore’s law. In the midst of a market dip, optimism reigned as keynote and AI Design Forum speakers addressed both looming challenges and explosive market opportunities during July 9-10 presentations at SEMICON West 2019 in San Francisco. SEMICON West again proved to be a magnet f... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Autos


Products/Services Siemens announced that Mazda Motor adopted the Capital electrical design software suite from Mentor, a Siemens Business, for the design of next-generation automotive electrical systems. Mazda is said to use Capital for model-based generative design for the electrical and electronic systems of the entire vehicle platform. Synopsys will host the 11th annual Codenomi-con USA ... » read more

Which Glitch Is Which?


Glitch is a commonly used term in modern vernacular, used to identify unexpected problems in everything from the space race, web site down time, or a crash of your latest mobile phone app. In electronics design glitch has a more specific meaning, referring to unnecessary signal transitions in a combinational circuit. Eliminating this extra switching activity can save power consumption, especial... » read more

Power Is Limiting Machine Learning Deployments


The total amount of power consumed for machine learning tasks is staggering. Until a few years ago we did not have computers powerful enough to run many of the algorithms, but the repurposing of the GPU gave the industry the horsepower that it needed. The problem is that the GPU is not well suited to the task, and most of the power consumed is waste. While machine learning has provided many ... » read more

Hybrid Emulation Takes Center Stage


From mobile to networking to AI applications, system complexity shows no sign of slowing. These designs, which may contain multiple billion gates, must be validated, verified and tested, and it’s no longer possible to just throw the whole thing in a hardware emulator. For some time, emulation, FPGA-based prototyping, and virtual environments such as simulators have given design and verific... » read more

Say Welcome to the Machine: Low-Power Machine Learning for Smart IoT Applications


By Pieter van der Wolf, Principal R&D Engineer, Synopsys Inc. and Dmitry Zakharov, Senior Software Engineer, Synopsys Inc Smart IoT devices that interact intelligently with their users are appearing in many application areas. Increasingly, these devices apply machine learning technology for processing captured sensor data, so that smart actions can be taken based on recognized patterns. ... » read more

Blog Review: July 24


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding notes that while two Florida cities may have saved taxpayers millions by paying ransomware demands, doing so is likely setting up a ransomware tsunami that threatens other municipalities. In a video, Cadence's Jacek Duda digs into what's going on with the upcoming USB4 standard and what will change compared to USB 3.x. Mentor's Colin Walls shares a few embedded ... » read more

Using Memory Differently To Boost Speed


Boosting memory performance to handle a rising flood of data is driving chipmakers to explore new memory types and different ways of using existing memory, but it also is creating some complex new challenges. For most of the semiconductor design industry, memory has been a non-issue for the past couple of decades. The main concerns were price and size, but memory makers have been more than a... » read more

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