Why Chips Are Getting Noisier


In the past, designers only had to worry about noise for sensitive analog portions of a design. Digital circuitry was immune. But while noise gets worse at newer process nodes, staying at 28nm does not mean that it can be ignored anymore. With Moore's Law slowing, designs have to do more with less. Margins are being squeezed, additional concurrency is added, and attempts are made to opti... » read more

Deep Learning Models With MATLAB And Cortex-A


Today, I’ve teamed up with Ram Cherukuri of MathWorks to provide an overview of the MathWorks toolchain for machine learning (ML) and the deployment of embedded ML inference on Arm Cortex-A using the Arm Compute Library. MathWorks enables engineers to get started quickly and makes machine learning possible without having to become an expert. If you’re an algorithm engineer interested ... » read more

BiST Grows Up In Automotive


Test concepts and methods that have been used for many years in traditional semiconductor and SoC design are now being leveraged for automotive chips, but they need to be adapted and upgraded to enable monitoring of advanced automotive systems during operation of a vehicle. Automotive and safety critical designs have very high quality, reliability, and safety requirements, which pairs pe... » read more

The Power Of Virtual Prototyping


As embedded SoCs continue to become more powerful and complex, beating the market may very well rely on non-traditional approaches to product design and development. Software-based methodologies involving virtual prototypes are helping to prove out designs earlier and enable companies to parallelize hardware and software development. Click here to download PDF. » read more

Blog Review: June 12


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that city and state governments aren't learning from history when it comes to ransomware, and despite numerous examples of recent attacks are not implementing proper security measures or even keeping systems patched. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares highlights from the recent Embedded Vision Summit, including how light can be used at femtosecond intervals to ob... » read more

Data Confusion At The Edge


Disparities in pre-processing of data at the edge, coupled with a total lack of standardization, are raising questions about how that data will be prioritized and managed in AI and machine learning systems. Initially, the idea was that 5G would connect edge data to the cloud, where massive server farms would infer patterns from that data and send it back to the edge devices. But there is far... » read more

Tessent Hierarchical ATPG Reference Flow for Arm Cortex-A75


Arm and Mentor have jointly developed a reference flow for a hierarchical DFT and ATPG implementation with Tessent for any Arm subsystem based on Cortex A-series IP. The reference flow, described in this paper, provides documentation, seamless interfaces, and scripts that accelerate the implementation of a hierarchical test solution. Arm and Mentor are dedicated to enabling customer success, re... » read more

Smart Plug-And-Play DFT For Arm Cores


Modern SoCs are experiencing continued growth in capabilities and design sizes with more and more subsystem IPs being implemented. These large, complex, multi-core SoCs need strategies for DFT and ATPG that effectively reduce DFT effort, minimize ATPG runtime, and still achieve the target test coverage. Hierarchical DFT enables designing and testing of these designs in a systematic and repeatab... » read more

Disregard Safety And Security At Your Own Peril


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss industry attitudes towards safety and security with Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification; Jacob Wiltgen, solutions architect for functional safety at Mentor, a Siemens Business; David Landoll, solutions architect for OneSpin Solutions; Dennis Ciplickas, vice president of characterization solutions at PDF Solutions; Andrew Dauma... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Infineon Technologies will acquire Cypress Semiconductor for $23.85 per share in cash, or $10.1 billion. The deal will place Infineon as the number eight chip manufacturer in the world based on 2018 revenues and create an automotive powerhouse, making the combined company the largest supplier of chips to the automotive market. Infineon sees potential to reach into new industrial and co... » read more

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