Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Ford Motor Company revealed it lost $827 million in the third quarter because of parts shortages and unexpected supplier costs. Those shortages affected 40,000 to 50,000 vehicles. The company is shutting down its interest in its self-driving car unit Argo.ai, which it shared with Volkswagen since 2019. Ford will instead focus on advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS), which... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 26


Synopsys' Teng-Kiat Lee and Sandeep Mehndiratta argue that IC design in the cloud can support an existing on-prem strategy, enable large and small enterprises to manage cost and capacity more effectively, and offer security for valuable semiconductor IP. Siemens EDA's Chris Spear finds that SystemVerilog classes are a good way to encapsulate both variables and the routines that operates on t... » read more

Chip Challenges In The Metaverse


The metaverse is pushing the limits of chip design, despite uncertainty about how much raw horsepower these devices ultimately will require to deliver an immersive blend of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. The big challenge in developing these systems is the ability to process mixed data types in real time while the data moves uninterrupted at lightning speed. That requires the integra... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 19


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster examines trends related to various aspects of FPGA design and the growing design complexity associated with increasing number of embedded processor cores, asynchronous clock domains, and more safety features. Synopsys' Twan Korthorst and Kenneth Larsen take a broad look at silicon photonics, including the benefits of electronic integration, accelerating the develop... » read more

Complex Tradeoffs In Inferencing Chips


Designing AI/ML inferencing chips is emerging as a huge challenge due to the variety of applications and the highly specific power and performance needs for each of them. Put simply, one size does not fit all, and not all applications can afford a custom design. For example, in retail store tracking, it's acceptable to have a 5% or 10% margin of error for customers passing by a certain aisle... » read more

Foundational Changes In Chip Architectures


We take many things in the semiconductor world for granted, but what if some of the decisions made decades ago are no longer viable or optimal? We saw a small example with finFETs, where the planar transistor would no longer scale. Today we are facing several bigger disruptions that will have much larger ripple effects. Technology often progresses in a linear fashion. Each step provides incr... » read more

The New Disruptive Force In High-End AIoT Markets


MediaTek is known for its SoC solutions in the mobile and consumer device markets. In fact, the smartphone market is now producing the most advanced and performant SoC designs on the planet. MediaTek is a vital part of this innovation. Each year it produces a range of chipsets for the mobile market, like the flagship Dimensity 9000 which adopted Arm’s v9 CPU and Mali-GPU technologies to del... » read more

PLANAR: A Programmable Accelerator For Near-Memory Data Rearrangement


Many applications employ irregular and sparse memory accesses that cannot take advantage of existing cache hierarchies in high performance processors. To solve this problem, Data Layout Transformation (DLT) techniques rearrange sparse data into a dense representation, improving locality and cache utilization. However, prior proposals in this space fail to provide a design that (i) scales with m... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 12


Synopsys' Richard Solomon, Madhumita Sanyal, and Gary Ruggles take a look at the possibilities that CXL 3.0 can bring to a variety of data-driven applications that demand increasingly higher levels of memory capacity, with higher bandwidth, more security, and lower latency. Siemens EDA's Rich Edelman provides some tips for debugging UVM testbenches, such as how to determine what line changed... » read more

Week in Review: Design, Low Power


Could power beams be the key to smart city infrastructure and 5G/6G connectivity? A new report says both lasers and microwaves offer possible paths forward in this area, though both technologies come with benefits and drawbacks. Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are desi... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →