Blog Review: Mar. 6


Synopsys' Snigdha Dua traces the evolution of memory from SDRAM to DDR5 and the techniques that provide each generation's speed increase. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into the challenges of 112Gbps SerDes, including what makes PAM4 signaling different from NRZ and what goes into equalization and modeling. Mentor's Rich Edelman provides a quick tutorial on how to set up a custom UVM report... » read more

New Design Approaches At 7/5nm


The race to build chips with a multitude of different processing elements and memories is making it more difficult to design, verify and test these devices, particularly when AI and leading-edge manufacturing processes are involved. There are two fundamental problems. First, there are much tighter tolerances for all of the components in those designs due to proximity effects. Second, as a re... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP OneSpin Solutions debuted the Hardware Metric Calculation (HMC) App, which uses automatically extracted design information to calculate key hardware metrics to comply with functional safety standards. In particular, it focuses on automotive and autonomous driving SoCs needing to meet the highest functional safety requirements defined by the ISO 26262 standard. The HMC App calcul... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Yingzi Technology of Guangzhou, China, has developed a “future pig farm” to demonstrate what technology can do to make keeping pigs more profitable in a country that is trying to reduce the number of small farms raising pigs and consolidate them into larger operations. China is also contending with an outbreak of African swine fever that has spread out of the country thr... » read more

Accelerate SSD Software Development And System Validation


The amount of data coming at us or that we produce ourselves in our daily lives continues to grow exponentially. It’s become the norm to stream movies and TV series from Netflix, as well as upload our own videos on YouTube. On top of this, a major shift in automotive (ADAS, autonomous driving) and surveillance are boosting the amount of data exchange that is happening every second. With th... » read more

The Problem With Post-Silicon Debug


Semiconductor engineers traditionally have focused on trying to create 'perfect' GDSII at tape-out, but factors such as hardware-software interactions, increasingly heterogeneous designs, and the introduction of AI are forcing companies to rethink that approach. In the past, chipmakers typically banked on longer product cycles and multiple iterations of silicon to identify problems. This no ... » read more

Can Debug Be Tamed?


Debug consumes more time than any other aspect of the chip design and verification process, and it adds uncertainty and risk to semiconductor development because there are always lingering questions about whether enough bugs were caught in the allotted amount of time. Recent figures suggest that the problem is getting worse, too, as complexity and demand for reliability continue to rise. The... » read more

Reverse Debug


Chun Chan, product applications engineering director at Synopsys, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about testbench debug and how adding time markers can speed time to signoff. https://youtu.be/tx_89M1bq3Q » read more

Efficient Low-Cost Implementation of NB-IoT for Smart Applications


NB-IoT is an emerging technology for narrowband wireless communication standardized by 3GPP. It has been designed with a focus on minimizing end-user equipment processing requirements and power consumption to enable the massive deployment of low-cost devices for a broad range of smart applications. This white paper highlights the key challenges of NB-IoT modem design. It proposes a hardware/sof... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 27


Mentor's Harry Foster checks out the trends in language and library adoption for IC/ASIC designs and finds increased adoption of SystemVerilog for both design and verification while UVM remains the dominant verification methodology. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding chats with Chris Clark of Synopsys and Tim Weisenberger of SAE about the weakest points in automotive security and why it's time to mo... » read more

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