Blog Review: Nov. 25


Mentor's Harry Foster finds growing complexity in FPGA design by looking at the number of embedded microprocessors, asynchronous clock domains, and safety/security features in the 2020 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study. Cadence's Paul McLellan points to the interim SRC/SIA Decadal Plan for Semiconductors and five big shifts it identifies in information and communication tec... » read more

Elasticity Without Compromise


At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the available RAM on a physical machine dictated, and ultimately limited, the size of designs that Ansys HFSS could simulate. This prompted engineers to buy incredibly expensive pieces of hardware — well into the six figures — to solve their most challenging problems. By necessity, engineers learned to “divide and conquer” their largest, most ... » read more

Brute-Force Analysis Not Keeping Up With IC Complexity


Much of the current design and verification flow was built on brute force analysis, a simple and direct approach. But that approach rarely scales, and as designs become larger and the number of interdependencies increases, ensuring the design always operates within spec is becoming a monumental task. Unless design teams want to keep adding increasing amounts of margin, they have to locate th... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys acquired Light Tec, a provider of optical scattering measurements and measurement equipment. The company also provides optical engineering consulting services plus training for use of Synopsys' lighting simulation software. "Light Tec's proven optical measurement capabilities provide our customers with robust new tools for high-accuracy optical product simulations and visualizations," ... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 18


Arm's Roberto Lopez Mendez finds that holographic displays can now be achieved on mobile processors thanks to recent algorithmic and computational advances. Mentor's Colin Walls examines the reasons the consolidate a number of automotive sub-systems onto a smaller number of powerful ECU to reduce complexity and increase system reliability. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at the devel... » read more

Disaggregation And Smarter Chips Shift Liability For Security


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security on chips with Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist at Ansys; Jason Oberg, CTO and co-founder of Tortuga Logic; Pamela Norton, CEO and founder of Borsetta; Ron Perez, fellow and technical lead for security architecture at Intel; and Tim Whitfield, vice president of strategy at Arm. What follows are excerpts of that conversation,... » read more

The Next Big Leap: Energy Optimization


The relationship between power and energy is technically simple, but its implication on the EDA flow is enormous. There are no tools or flows today that allow you to analyze, implement, and optimize a design for energy consumption, and getting to that point will require a paradigm shift within the semiconductor industry. The industry talks a lot about power, and power may have become a more ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Synopsys acquired Moortec, a provider of in-chip monitoring technology specializing in process, voltage and temperature (PVT) sensors. Moortec's sensors will be a key component to Synopsys' new Silicon Lifecycle Management (SLM) platform. "This acquisition accelerates the expansion of our SLM platform by providing our customers with a comprehensive data-analytics-driven solution for de... » read more

Designs Beyond The Reticle Limit


Designs continue to grow in size and complexity, but today they are reaching both physical and economic challenges. These challenges are causing a reversal of the integration trend that has provided much of the performance and power gains over the past couple of decades. The industry, far from giving up, is exploring new ways to enable designs to go beyond the reticle size, which is around 8... » read more

Design For Manufacturing Best Practices


Manufacturing issues are one of the top reasons that we see warranty returns and loss of market share in the electronics industry. Issues like supply chain failures and printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) production challenges related to design can lead to irreparable damage to a brand’s reputation. It is therefore critical that companies have a design for manufacturability (DfM) protocol i... » read more

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