The Week In Review: Design


M&A Imagination will sell its MIPS business to Tallwood, a California-based venture capital firm, for $65m in cash. The sale is expected to close in October. The rest of Imagination is slated to be sold to Canyon Bridge for £550 million in cash (~$740 million), a deal dependent on the MIPS sale. The Chinese-backed investment firm has featured recently in the news for its attempted purchas... » read more

Verification’s Breaking Points


Verification efficiency and speed can vary significantly from one design to the next, and that variability is rising alongside growing design complexity. The result is a new level of unpredictability about how much it will cost to complete the verification process, whether it will meet narrow market windows, and whether quality will be traded off to get a chip out on time in the hopes that it c... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys acquired materials modeling company QuantumWise. QuantumWise tools focus on atomic-scale modeling of nanostructures using quantum-mechanical computational methods, classical potentials, and electrostatic models. Based in Denmark, the company was started in 2008 when it acquired the assets of Atomistix. The technology will be integrated with Synopsys' Sentaurus TCAD. Terms of t... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled a new equivalence checking tool which features a massively parallel architecture capable of scaling to 100s of CPUs and adaptive proof technology that analyzes each partition and determines the optimal formal algorithm. According to the company, the Conformal Smart Logic Equivalence Checker provides an average of 4X runtime improvement with the same resources over the pr... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled an integrated memory design and verification tool, with environments for bitcell design, array and complier verification, and memory characterization. It utilizes existing simulation databases for multi-corner and Monte Carlo analysis, which the company says can lead to a 2X runtime improvement. Solido Design Automation uncorked PVTMC Verifier, which uses machine lear... » read more

The Limits Of IP Reuse


The basic business proposition for third-party IP is that it's cheaper, faster, and less problematic to buy rather than build. But things haven't exactly worked out according to plan, either for companies that license IP or those that develop it. For [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"] licensees, just keeping track of an endless series of updates is becoming unwieldy. Complex designs often include ... » read more

Reducing Latency In ADAS SoC Design Enhances QoS For Digital Mirroring


The state-of-the-art of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is quickly changing, and ADAS chip engineers are finding that on-chip quality-of-service (QoS) is becoming a system-level constraint on ADAS performance. Designers need innovative approaches to address these issues, which is why Dream Chip Technologies highlighted one such method in a recent presentation. Dream Chip Technologi... » read more

The Secret Life Of Accelerators


Accelerator chips increasingly are providing the performance boost that device scaling once provided, changing basic assumptions about how data moves within an electronic system and where it should be processed. To the outside world, little appears to have changed. But beneath the glossy exterior, and almost always hidden from view, accelerator chips are becoming an integral part of most des... » read more

Rethinking Car Design


The automotive industry is undergoing sweeping changes in both technology and business, and functional safety increasingly cuts across both of them. Every safety-critical industry has one or more functional safety standards, whether that is manufacturing, avionics or automotive. In automotive, it's a combination of [gettech id="31076" comment="ISO 26262"] and various ASIL levels, which are a... » read more

Toward Better Accelerators


In the not-too-distant past, the standard mobile application processor architecture was the predominant one used for most System-on-Chip (SoC) designs, but that is rapidly changing as new systems and applications emerge in the post-mobile computing era. New requirements for autonomous driving are motivating technology innovations: Visual processing, deep neural networks and machine learning pla... » read more

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