Uncertainty Rocks Chip Market


The semiconductor industry is undergoing sweeping changes in every direction, making it far more difficult to figure out which path to take next, when to take it, and how to get there. The next few years will redefine which semiconductor companies emerge as leaders, which ones get pushed down or out or absorbed into other companies, and which markets will be the most lucrative. And that coul... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics uncorked the latest version of its Catapult high-level synthesis platform, adding a formal-based C Property Checker tool to automatically identify and formally prove hard-to-find issues like uninitialized memory, divide by 0, and array bounds errors in the users' HLS C++/SystemC model. IP ARM unveiled the Cortex-A73 and Mali-G71 processors. According to ARM, the g... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Mergers & Acquisitions Synopsys made a couple of announcements this week related to its TCAD business. First, they acquired Gold Standard Simulations, which clearly became a major factor in the release of a pre-wafer simulation solution to help semiconductor manufacturers reduce process node development time. The new solution aims to provide a comprehensive process, transistor and circui... » read more

The Mightier Microcontroller


Microcontrollers are becoming more complex, more powerful, and significantly more useful, but those improvements come with strings attached. While it's relatively straightforward to develop multi-core microcontroller (MCU) hardware with advanced power management features, it's much more difficult to write software for these chips because memory is limited. CPUs can use on-chip memory such as... » read more

Do Single-Vendor Flows Make Sense Yet?


For many years in the EDA industry, there has been talk of a complete design tool flow from a single vendor, and each of the main EDA players is capable of offering one. But whether they actually do — or should — is an interesting discussion. There are obvious pros and cons on the technical side. But it is the business and marketing issues that are really at the crux of the debate today.... » read more

Executive Insight: K. Charles Janac


K. Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's changing in the automotive market, the impact of big data, and heterogeneous cache coherency. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: What are the big changes you're seeing in semiconductor design? Janac: There are a lot of changes right now. Mobility is slowing down and b... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Acquisitions ARM acquired embedded computer vision and imaging technology company [getentity id="22917" comment="Apical"] for $350 million in cash. According to ARM, the company's technology has been utilized in more than 1.5 billion smartphones and in about 300 million other consumer and industrial devices. Synopsys acquired [getentity id="22916" comment="Simpleware"], a provider of soft... » read more

Power-Centric Chip Architectures


As traditional scaling runs out of steam, new chip architectures are emerging with power as the starting point. While this trend has been unfolding for some time, it is getting an extra boost and sense of urgency as design teams weigh a growing number of design challenges and options across a variety of new markets. Among the options are [getkc id="196" kc_name="multi-patterning"] and [getkc... » read more

Rethinking Processor Architectures


The semiconductor industry's obsession with clock speeds, cores and how many transistors fit on a piece of silicon may be nearing an end for real this time. The [getentity id="22048" comment="IEEE"] said it will develop the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), effectively setting the industry agenda for future silicon benchmarking and adding metrics that are relevant to specifi... » read more

End Of Mixed Signal Engineering?


EDA companies are stepping back after years of trying to force engineers to combine analog and digital disciplines. Rather than emphasizing [getkc id="38" kc_name="mixed signal"] as a single expertise, they are building bridges and translation mechanisms between the two worlds. The moves cap more than a decade of trying to find optimal ways to pack [getkc id="37" kc_name="analog"] and digita... » read more

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