The New Face Of Formal


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the recent growth in adoption of formal technologies and tools with Lawrence Loh, product engineering group director at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"], Praveen Tiwari, senior manager of R&D in the verification group at [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"], Harry Foster, chief scientist at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphic... » read more

You Can’t Walk Straight Blindfolded


Let’s examine the first part of the title of this blog. It is stated as a given. But is it true that you really can’t walk straight when blindfolded? That is what my children and I set out to investigate one sunny afternoon in October (yes we live in California). We looked for a nice open field with little to no surrounding sound, so that you cannot use the sound to set your bearing. We ... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 28


Get up to date on the latest USB 3.1 happenings with Synopsys' Eric Huang, including the first laptops shipping with the Type C connector, the importance of USB safety, and price cuts on chips from Intel and ASMedia. The connected car is ready to hit the mass market, according to automakers, but customer adoption has been slow. Mentor's John Day takes a look at a report from the TU-Detroit c... » read more

Will The Chip Work?


As the number of possible issues mount for integrating IP into complex chips, so does the focus on solving these issues. What becomes quickly apparent to anyone integrating multiple IP blocks is that one size doesn't fit all, either from an IP or a tools standpoint. There is no single solution because there is no single way of putting IP together. Each architecture is unique, and each brings... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A ARM acquired Carbon Design Systems and its staff for an undisclosed sum, adding virtual prototyping capabilities for ARM cores. In 2008, ARM sold Carbon the tools it acquired in the 2004 purchase of virtual prototype development company AXYS Design Automation. Tools Mentor Graphics updated its PADS software, adding 3D tool capabilities to provide visualization, placement, and d... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 21


Ansys' Bill Vandermark goes back to the future in this week's top five picks. Plus, the star of the world's longest hoverboard flight gets an upgrade. Perhaps the person riding it will be wearing an ocean-cleaning bikini. Straight from MemCon 2015, Rambus' Aharon Etengoff brings us a keynote exploring the increasingly blurred lines between memory and storage, and how an alternative paradigm ... » read more

Analog Meets Power In Standards Groups


While the topic of language [getkc id="13" comment="Standards"] might be cringe-worthy for some, there is some noteworthy work underway in this area—particularly where power and analog meet paths. There are four main standards here: Verilog-A and Verilog-AMS VHDL-AMS SystemC-AMS SystemVerilog-AMS SystemVerilog-AMS is the newcomer, and while the standard won't be available for ... » read more

Gaps In Performance, Power Coverage


The semiconductor industry always has used metrics to define progress, and in areas such as functional verification significant advances have been made. But so far, no effective metrics have been developed for power, performance, or other system-level concerns, which basically means that design teams have to run blind. On the plus side, the industry has migrated from the use of code coverage... » read more

Outbound Power Management


Many years ago when I first suggested that we should do platform-level power instead of focusing on the CPU, I was considered somewhat of a heretic. Yet, within 10 to 15 years of that recommendation, most of the platforms around us have moved to that method using operating system functions to keep track of the overall power, battery life, etc. As we move into the era of billions of connected de... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 14


Rambus' Aharon Etengoff explores how new optical interfaces are aiding the burgeoning field of optogenetics, which combines genetic targeting of specific neurons or proteins with optical technology to study living neural circuits. Anand Shirahatti, Divyang Mali, and Naveen G of Synopsys team up to explain three features that make the MIPI UniPro mobile interconnect stand out, along with the ... » read more

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