Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Lots more fabs and capacity The chip industry sees opportunity in shortages, and is racing to meet demand. SEMI reports 19 new worldwide high-volume fabs already have started construction, or will start by end of this year, and another 10 are scheduled in 2022. “Equipment spending for these 29 fabs is expected to surpass $140 billion over the next few years as the industry pushes to addre... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys will acquire the semiconductor and flat panel display solutions of BISTel. The acquisition will add an integrated and comprehensive yield management and prediction solution for manufacturing quality and efficiency. BISTel provides engineering equipment systems and AI applications for smart manufacturing in a range of industries. "Combining Synopsys' and BISTel's expertise in fab soluti... » read more

Rocky Road To Designing Chips In The Cloud


EDA is moving to the cloud in fits and starts as tool vendors sort out complex financial models and tradeoffs while recognizing a potentially big new opportunity to provide unlimited processing capacity using a pay-as-you-go approach. By all accounts, a tremendous amount of tire-kicking is happening now as EDA vendors and users delve into the how and why of moving to the cloud for chip desig... » read more

Blog Review: June 23


Synopsys' Manuel Mota shows how splitting SoCs into smaller dies for advanced packaging and using die-to-die interfaces to enable high bandwidth, low latency, and low power connectivity can benefit hyperscale data centers. Siemens EDA's Chris Spear explains the relationship between classes and objects in SystemVerilog with a handy visualization and notes the difference between SystemVerilog ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Rambus is making a push for Compute Express Link (CXL) with two acquisitions and the launch of its CXL Memory Interconnect Initiative. The initiative aims to define and develop semiconductor solutions for advanced data center architectures, with initial research and development focusing on solutions to support key memory expansion and pooling use cases. CXL is an open interconnect specificat... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive U.S. electric truck manufacturer Lordstown Motors has an electric truck but after a large buyer fell through, it admitted it does not have any firm orders on its trucks, according to an AP story. The CEO and CFO resigned earlier this week. The electric car company Canoo announced its US manufacturing facility will be in Oklahoma. Cadence revealed its Tensilica FloatingPoint DSP (... » read more

Shifting Toward Data-Driven Chip Architectures


An explosion in data is forcing chipmakers to rethink where to process data, which are the best types of processors and memories for different types of data, and how to structure, partition and prioritize the movement of raw and processed data. New chips from systems companies such as Google, Facebook, Alibaba, and IBM all incorporate this approach. So do those developed by vendors like Appl... » read more

Blog Review: June 16


Arm's Adrian Herrera explores the latest version of AMBA ATP Engine, an open-source implementation of the AMBA Adaptive Traffic Profiles (ATP) synthetic traffic framework specification, which adds the ability to program AMBA ATP traffic generation from Linux environments. Cadence's Paul McLellan finds out just how effective glitching chips is by delivering incorrect voltages and clock freque... » read more

Thermal Floorplanning For Chips


Heat management is becoming crucial to an increasing number of chips, and it's one of a growing number of interconnected factors that must be considered throughout the entire development flow. At the same time, design requirements are exacerbating thermal problems. Those designs either have to increase margins or become more intelligent about the way heat is generated, distributed, and dissi... » read more

Using Model-Based Systems Engineering To Design Complex Systems


By Anthony Dawson and Jane Trenaman The benefits of using simulation early and often in the product development process are clear. You can verify requirements and begin studying and exploring design alternatives before prototyping and investing time in designs that ultimately won’t meet requirements. What may not be clear is how to integrate all the simulation tools that different engineer... » read more

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