Chip Industry Week In Review


A flurry of announcements on advanced semiconductors and AI rolled out this week as U.S. President Biden wrapped up his term: The Biden-Harris Administration released an Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion to strengthen U.S. security and economic leadership in AI. The rule aims to ensure responsible global AI development by streamlining chip sales to allies, setting sec... » read more

Power Budgets Optimized By Managing Glitch Power


“Waste not, want not,” says the old adage, and in general, that’s good advice to live by. But in the realm of chip design, wasting power is a fact of physics. Glitch power – power that gets expended due to delays in gates and/or wires – can account for up to 40% of the power budget in advanced applications like data center servers. Even in less high-powered circuits, such as those fou... » read more

2025: So Many Possibilities


The stage is set for a year of innovation in the chip industry, unlike anything seen for decades, but what makes this period of advancement truly unique is the need to focus on physics and real design skills. Planar scaling of SoCs enabled design and verification tools and methodologies to mature on a relatively linear path, but the last few years have created an environment for more radical... » read more

How Engineering Simulation Drives Impact for Sustainability


For decades, engineering simulation has been the engineer’s Swiss Army knife for improving the speed and cost of developing new products as well as for bringing product performance to the next level. This report reveals that while simulation has already made a significant contribution to advancing sustainability, there is still so much potential to make an even greater impact. In the conte... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 15


Siemens EDA's Stephen V. Chavez argues that the placement of decoupling capacitors on a PCB can make or break a design's power delivery system and provides some best practices and design considerations, such as ensuring even distribution on a board rather than crowding them around chips. Synopsys' Stelios Diamantidis predicts that in 2025, AI agents will begin collaborating with other AI age... » read more

Startup Challenges In A Changing EDA World


The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry is a mature industry, but it's also one that is constantly changing. Each process node and packaging technology advancement places new demands and constraints on existing tools. In addition, changing design problems and paradigms transform how design teams operate, and the goals they target. For a relatively small industry, EDA requires a dispr... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Global semiconductor sales hit $57.8 billion in November 2024, an increase of 20.7% compared to the same month last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In U.S. government news: The U.S. Department of Commerce finalized up to $325 million in CHIPS Act funding for Hemlock Semiconductor, which will support construction of a new semiconductor-grade polysilicon manufac... » read more

Edge And IoT Security Turning A Corner


Security is beginning to improve for a wide range of IoT and edge devices due to better tools, the implementation of new standards and methodologies, and an increasing level of collaboration and communication across different market segments that in the past had little or no interaction. Until recently, many vendors in cost-sensitive markets offered the bare minimum of security. To make matt... » read more

How Software-Defined Vehicles Change Auto Chip Design


The shift to software-defined vehicles is changing nearly every aspect of automotive design, from what hardware is added into vehicles, when it gets added, and what gets left behind. Moving key features to software rather than hardware allows carmakers to bring new features to market faster, at a lower cost, and to modify those features more quickly. It is also expected to drive up the value... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 8


Cadence's Igor Krause unravels the different Orthogonal Header Content (OHC) types in PCIe 6.0, which work as an extra header for the Transaction Layer Packet (TLP) that incorporates information fields that are needed depending on the TLP type. Siemens EDA's Yunhong Min considers how AI and machine learning are reshaping functional verification workflows from translating specifications to de... » read more

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