Blog Review: Aug. 26


Synopsys' Marc Greenberg attended IDF and learned more about the newly announced Intel/Micron 3D XPoint memory technology named Optane including initial ship dates and some implementation details. In concluding his analysis of the 2014 Functional Verification Study, Mentor's Harry Foster reveals an unexpected finding about design size and respins. How do you keep your power grid from bein... » read more

Delivering Functional Verification Engagements


With the advent of smarter and higher performing devices, there has been a tremendous increase in design complexity. Driven by new high-end hardware feature and intelligent software requirements, these devices are comprised of multi-core processors and a multitude of interface IP, memory and other analog circuitry, communicating via many different interface protocols. This poses a huge challeng... » read more

Who’s Calling The Shots


As discussed in part one of this report, OEMs are making more of the decisions about what goes into a system design. A large part of this shift involves software, which falls on many plates throughout the ecosystem. Making sure all of the layers of software interoperate and integrate well together is no small feat, and it is growing in complexity at every turn as systems becomes more sophist... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Chips Rambus moved into the fabless market with the announcement that it is developing memory controller chips, expanding the company's business beyond just creating IP for the memory and security markets. Read Ed Sperling's full analysis. Standards Accellera updated the Standard Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI). The newest version of the standard, SCE-MI 2.3, expands the set o... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 19


Several of this week's top reads from Ansys' Justin Nescott sound like they're straight from the pages of sci-fi novels (and comic books). An MIT project is getting close to creating the Iron Man suit, one company plans to finally build a space elevator, and Los Angeles takes an innovative approach to fighting the California drought: 96 million black plastic balls. Smartphones are so yestery... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In Chip Business


Shifting business models, acquisitions, minority investments and increasing uncertainty are creating fundamental shifts in the semiconductor industry that could redefine who is successful in which markets for years to come. The announcement today that [getentity id="22671" e_name="Rambus"] is developing memory controller chips, expanding its business beyond just creating IP for the memory an... » read more

How Much Security Is Enough?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the current state of [getkc id="223" kc_name="security"] and what must be done in the future, with Denis Noël, head of cyber security solutions at [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"]; Serge Leef, vice president of new ventures at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Andreas Kuehlman, senior vice president and general manager of the soft... » read more

Thermal Issues Getting Worse


Making sure that smartphone you’re holding doesn’t burn your face when you make a call requires a tremendous amount of engineering effort at all levels of the design - the case, the chips, the packaging. The developers of the IP subsystems in that smartphone must adhere to very strict power and energy thresholds so the OEM putting it all together can stick to some semblance of a product des... » read more

Tech Talk: 4K Screen Design


Hezi Saar, MIPI IP product manager at Synopsys, talks about how to design high-resolution displays for mobile devices and what can go wrong. [youtube vid=rQKNM0CABM0] » read more

DVFS On The Sidelines


Power reduction is one of the most important aspects of chip design these days, but not all power reduction techniques are used equally. Some that were once important are fading and dynamic voltage, and frequency scaling (DVFS) is one of them. What's changed, and will we see a resurgence in the future? What is it? DVFS has physics powerfully in its favor. As Vinod Viswanath, director of res... » read more

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