It Takes A Village To Get A Design Done


No one lacks for brilliant ideas these days. In fact, it’s a golden age of innovation. But where the pace of innovation can slow is getting that idea to market. Take for example, the case of one of S3 Semiconductors' customers.. It recently developed a custom chip solution for a company in the oil and gas industry that was creating complex valve controllers that sensed pressure and tempera... » read more

CEO Outlook On Chip Industry (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics; and Dean Drako, CEO of IC Manage. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one, click here. Part two is here. L-R: Dean Drako, Grant Pierce, Wally Rhines, Simon Segars. Photo: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance SE: Securit... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Tools/Chips Synopsys rolled out a new release of its automotive exterior lighting design and analysis software. The tool calculations and generates images for multiple viewing directions and different lighting conditions. Lighting on vehicles has become far more complex than just shining a beam on the road. The latest technology can adapt to road conditions, other cars, and help illuminate the... » read more

Chip Dis-Integration


Just because something can be done does not always mean that it should be done. One segment of the semiconductor industry is learning the hard way that continued chip integration has a significant downside. At the same time, another another group has just started to see the benefits of consolidating functionality onto a single substrate. Companies that have been following Moore's Law and hav... » read more

Near-Threshold Issues Deepen


Complex issues stemming from near-threshold computing, where the operating voltage and threshold voltage are very close together, are becoming more common at each new node. In fact, there are reports that the top five mobile chip companies, all with chips at 10/7nm, have had performance failures traced back to process variation and timing issues. Once a rather esoteric design technique, near... » read more

Seven Steps To Build A Successful IoT Solution


The technology sector is on course to produce a trillion connected IoT devices in the next two decades. As an innovator, you want to take advantage of this, but how and where do you begin navigating a complex world of hardware and software choices? The breadth of technology makes it easy for designers to build any kind of IoT solution at any scale across a continuum of applications. W... » read more

Blog Review: June 13


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks at what the flaws in OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption means for the IoT and warns that the problems of patching such devices could lead to an increasing chance of security failures. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a peek at Imec's roadmap to see what the path to 3nm looks like, how nanosheets fit in, and why design and system technology co-optimization is necessar... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Synopsys added machine learning capabilities to its Design Platform. The company highlighted benefits to the PrimeTime signoff tool, which saw 5X faster power recovery in customer designs at leading-edge geometries. Renesas is using the tool, noting a 4X power ECO speed-up. ArterisIP unveiled a standalone last level cache (LLC) for high-performance SoCs. CodaCache can be adde... » read more

Machine Learning’s Limits (Part 1)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Rob Aitken, an Arm fellow; Raik Brinkmann, CEO of OneSpin Solutions; Patrick Soheili, vice president of business and corporate development at eSilicon; and Chris Rowen, CEO of Babblelabs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are we with machine learning? What problems still have to be resolved? Aitken: We're in a state where thi... » read more

Blog Review: June 6


In a video, Cadence's Marc Greenberg discusses the advantages and trade-offs of HBM2 and GDDR6, two advanced memory interfaces targeted to the high-performance computing market. Synopsys' Ravindra Aneja takes a look at what's needed for AI-focused hardware designs and how formal can help with the necessary data path verification. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls explains the challenges of... » read more

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