Security In The ARM Ecosystem


Building security in an SoC aiming to meet the goals set by the ARM Platform Security Architecture (PSA) is a complex matter. This is compounded by the complexity of modern-day SoCs comprising multiple processors, security domains and security levels. The Rambus root of trust provides a solid foundation for the SoC security architecture ticking ‘all the boxes’ for reaching the security goal... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 3


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on the outlook from SEMI's recent Industry Strategy Symposium, which looked at the prospects for global recovery, the application areas where growth is expected, and how segments have recently performed. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster takes a look at trends in the adoption of languages and libraries for IC and ASIC designs and finds continued interest in System... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The CXL Consortium published the Compute Express Link 2.0 specification. CXL is an interconnect that maintains memory coherency between the CPU memory space and memory on attached devices. CXL 2.0 adds support for switching for fan-out to connect to more devices, memory pooling for increased memory utilization efficiency and providing memory capacity on demand, and support for persistent memory... » read more

Roaring ’20s For The Chip Industry


2020 was a good year for the semiconductor industry and the EDA industry that fuels it, but 2021 has the opportunity to be even better. New end application markets continue to open, and what were once seen as technical hurdles are leading to a multitude of innovative solutions, all of which need suitable tooling. No company can afford to invest everywhere, and so for EDA companies, their rel... » read more

ISA Ownership Matters: A Tale of Three ISAs


An instruction set architecture (ISA) is crucial to the development of processors and their software ecosystems. In the last half century, the majority of ISAs have been owned by single companies, whether product companies for their own chips/systems or processor IP companies who licensed their processors to chip developers. Does ISA ownership matter? Let’s consider three proprietary ISAs a... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 27


Synopsys' Godwin Maben finds that applications like high-performance computing and AI are bringing new dynamics to the power equation, and the key power considerations for chip design that will likely emerge over the course of the year. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster checks out trends in verification technology adoption for IC and ASIC design, with increasing numbers of designs using both dynami... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 20


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster takes a look at the amount of time IC and ASIC projects spend in verification, changes in the number of engineers on a project, and how engineers are spending their time. Synopsys' Stelios Diamantidis considers the importance of specialized accelerators for AI workloads as both cloud and edge push the PPA limits of current technologies. Cadence's Paul McLellan p... » read more

Hidden Costs In Faster, Low-Power AI Systems


Chipmakers are building orders of magnitude better performance and energy efficiency into smart devices, but to achieve those goals they also are making tradeoffs that will have far-reaching, long-lasting, and in some cases unknown impacts. Much of this activity is a direct result of pushing intelligence out to the edge, where it is needed to process, sort, and manage massive increases in da... » read more

Von Neumann Is Struggling


In an era dominated by machine learning, the von Neumann architecture is struggling to stay relevant. The world has changed from being control-centric to one that is data-centric, pushing processor architectures to evolve. Venture money is flooding into domain-specific architectures (DSA), but traditional processors also are evolving. For many markets, they continue to provide an effective s... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility Tesla has to recall 158,000 2012-2018 Model S and 2016-2018 Model X vehicles because of an eMMC NAND flash memory chip. The chip can cause the touchscreen to stop working when the memory reaches its limit of writes. According to a story in Reuters, the United States NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) is insisting on the recall because many of Tesla contr... » read more

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