The Challenges Of Incremental Verification


Verification consumes more time and resources than design, and yet little headway is being made to optimize it. The reasons are complex, and there are more questions than there are answers. For example, what is the minimum verification required to gain confidence in a design change? How can you minimize the cost of finding out that the change was bad, or that it had unintended consequences? ... » read more

Big Changes In Embedded Software


Every good hardware or software design starts with a structured approach throughout the design cycle, but as chip architectures and applications begin focusing on specific domains and include some version of AI, that structure is becoming more difficult to define. Embedded software, which in the past was written for very narrow functions with a minimal footprint, is increasingly getting blended... » read more

Arm’s Input Qualification Methodology Using PowerPro


This white paper proposes a new automated input qualification methodology that Arm developed using Siemens EDA’s PowerPro software portfolio that performs various data integrity checks at the IC design build and prototype stage. This methodology ensures in quicker iterations that input data are high fidelity, leading to a well correlated power numbers. Should multiple iterations be necessary,... » read more

Blog Review: April 27


Siemens' Joseph Dailey and Jake Wiltgen dispel misunderstandings around safety qualification of software tools and point to some of the safety issues that could lead to schedule delays and additional costs. Synopsys' Mark Kahan explains the testing that went into creating parts of the James Webb Space Telescope and key questions that were asked to ensure the mission could be successful even ... » read more

Paving The Way To Chiplets


The packaging industry is putting pieces in place to broaden the adoption of chiplets beyond just a few chip vendors, setting the stage for next-generation 3D chip designs and packages. New chiplet standards, and a cost analysis tool for determining the feasibility of a given chiplet-based design, are two new and important pieces. Along with other efforts, the goal is to propel the chiplet m... » read more

More Options, Less Dark Silicon


Chipmakers are beginning to re-examine how much dark silicon should be used in a heterogenous system, where it works best, and what alternatives are available — a direct result of a slowdown in Moore's Law scaling and the increasing disaggregation of SoCs. The concept of dark silicon has been around for a couple decades, but it really began taking off with the introduction of the Internet ... » read more

Blog Review: April 20


Cadence's Paul McLellan looks at the difference between 3D packaging and 3D integration and the different approaches to system-in-package designs. Siemens' Spencer Acain finds that despite having less precision and flexibility than digital chips, analog computing is having a resurgence in the space of cutting-edge AI thanks to the speed and energy efficiency in specialized tasks. Synopsys... » read more

Energy Harvesting Starting To Gain Traction


Tens of billions of IoT devices are powered by batteries today. Depending on the compute intensity and the battery chemistry, these devices can run steadily for short periods of time, or they can run occasionally for decades. But in some cases, they also can either harvest energy themselves, or tap into externally harvested energy, allowing them to work almost indefinitely. Energy harvesting... » read more

The Set Top Box Is Getting A Retrofit


Will processors jumpstart 8K? System-on-chip (SoC) designers and home device makers are experimenting with AI techniques to upscale high-definition or even standard-definition programs in a way that looks natural and realistic. Here’s how it works. Rather than stretching an image over a wider battery of pixels (causing pixelation) or filling in the new pixels by extrapolating informatio... » read more

Architecting Faster Computers


To create faster computers, the industry must take a major step back and re-examine choices that were made half a century ago. One of the most likely approaches involves dropping demands for determinism, and this is being attempted in several different forms. Since the establishment of the von Neumann architecture for computers, small, incremental improvements have been made to architectures... » read more

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