Chiplets Vs. Soft IP: Different In Almost Every Way


Chiplets serve a similar function as the soft IP widely used in chips today, but the similarities end there. While both can speed time to market and enable design teams to focus limited resources where they can best be applied, the implementation, manufacturing, test, and long-term business requirements wrought by a chiplet marketplace would be very different. Soft IP (also known as RTL IP) ... » read more

Digital Engineering Drives Industry 5.0


During the Fourth Industrial Revolution, known as Industry 4.0, industrial processes and manufacturing shifted toward digitization in nearly every market, from agriculture and mining to heavy machinery and building automation systems. Today, this digital transformation is not slowing down. A global industrial robotics survey from McKinsey & Co. revealed that industrial companies are expecte... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 3


Cadence's Reela Samuel notes that as multi-die integration becomes the new engine of semiconductor performance, the decision between 2.5D and 3D-IC architectures shapes a design's achievable bandwidth, energy efficiency, thermal limits, system size, and even program schedules. Synopsys' Thomas Andersen suggests that the deployment of physical AI will require the fusion of advanced electronic... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 26


Cadence's Rajneesh Chauhan explains CXL's low power state, L0p, which maintains partial lane activity for efficient power management without compromising performance, and how comprehensive verification can help ensure reliable implementation. Siemens' John Ferguson provides a brief history of design rule checking, major advancements over the years, and why introducing it in earlier design st... » read more

AI Plays Multiple Roles Within EDA


AI's infusion into our world may seem sudden and unexpected, but EDA has been quietly adopting it for more than a decade. What's changed is that it's now becoming more visible, thanks to increasingly powerful large language models (LLMs) and the need to apply them to increasingly challenging multi-physics problems. Two fundamental shifts underlie AI's increasing prominence. First, heat is be... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


China's Hefei Lumiverse Technology reportedly has developed a desktop-sized High Harmonic Generation light source that generates wavelengths as small as 1nm. One customer already has used it to produce 14nm chips, which was the original target node for EUV, according to one report. As a point of comparison, TSMC and Samsung didn't start using EUV until the 7nm node, relying instead on immersion... » read more

New Panel Production Efforts Target Interposer Costs


The rising cost of increasingly large interposers is spurring renewed interest in panel-level manufacturing, which for years has hobbled along due to the massive and collective effort required by the chip industry to change formats. Several companies are developing their own processes, although there is currently no commercial production. And a new consortium called Joint3, spearheaded by Ja... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 19


Cadence's Mamta Rana explores how Forward Error Correction in PCIe 6.0 is key to its 64.0 GT/s per lane bandwidth by enabling the receiver to detect and correct errors without retransmissions or protocol-level recovery by adding redundant information to transmitted data. Siemens' Dave Rich shares a paper from DVCon 1992 that introduced a new RTL modeling construct to Verilog, eventually know... » read more

Edge AI Is Starting To Transform Industrial IoT


A slew of wireless and increasingly multi-modal sensors is being targeted at the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), setting the stage for significant improvements in efficiency, higher yield, and reduced downtime. Wired IIoT devices, such as smart energy meters and breakers, industrial network gateways, and environmental sensors already are well established in factory settings. They have ... » read more

Noise: A Chip Killer


Noise has always been important to communications experts, but it's quickly becoming an issue that every semiconductor designer has to contend with. Some chips already have been compromised. Noise can be defined as any deviation from the ideal that can impact intended functionality. When it comes to semiconductors, that could mean the ability to reliably extract a signal value at the intende... » read more

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