Big Data, Big Holes


Having the potential to collect massive amounts of data from a variety of sources is the latest tool for trend spotting, predictive modeling, and forecasting of information. Information is power and big data promises to provide substantial, significant data that can be used by all tiers of businesses in the development of any number of new industrial and commercial strategies. For retailers ... » read more

GF Closes On IBM Chip Business Purchase


By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Ed Sperling and Mark LaPedus GlobalFoundries completed its acquisition of IBM's Microelectronics Group today, creating a behemoth that is expected to extend well beyond the combined footprint of the existing companies. To begin with, GlobalFoundries will get two additional fabs, one of which makes RF SOI chips. But while IBM was hesitant to expand that business ... » read more

Executive Insight: Wally Rhines


Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's changing across a wide swath of the industry, where the new opportunities will be, when security will become a real opportunity for EDA, and why Moore's Law will die but progress will continue forever. SE: Looking back over the past year, what's changed and where are the possible r... » read more

More Data, Different Approaches


Scaling, rising complexity, and integration are all contributing to an explosion in data, from initial design to physical layout to verification and into the manufacturing phase. Now the question is what to do with all of that data. For SoC designs, that data is critical for identifying real and potential problems. It also allows verification engineers working the back end of the design flow... » read more

EDA’s Clouded Future


There was a time, not that long ago, when chip design and EDA tools consumed some of the largest data centers with tens of thousands of machines and single datasets that consumed more than a hard disk could hold. The existing IT capabilities of the times were stretched to their limits. But while design sizes grew, other aspects of the flow did not develop as fast. “This has been driven by ... » read more

Big Data, Big Opportunities


For the last two decades I have spent a lot of my time managing operations and sales for several EDA startups, most of which were acquired. The focus of many of these companies was to provide solutions to optimize complex designs. We worked to enhance many of the top 25 semiconductor companies’ physical implementation flows using cutting edge technologies and methodologies to improve power, p... » read more

Full Coverage Or Full Monty


Without adequate coverage metrics and tools, verification engineers would never be able to answer the proverbial question: are we done yet? But a lot has changed in the design flow since the existing set of metrics was defined. Does it still ensure that the right things get verified, that time is not wasted on things deemed unimportant or a duplication of effort, and can it handle today’s hie... » read more

Big Data Needs Bigger Memory


By Rodrigo Liang Over the last few decades, the semiconductor industry has focused its considerable technical investments in accelerating software applications. Performance metrics for new semiconductor products are often correlated with their ability to lower the latency to access data required to run specific software applications. The need for increased performance from semiconductors ... » read more

Smart Grids, Smart Cities


What makes today’s power grid “intelligent” is the modernization of the technologies that both provide and support power distribution. These technologies use intelligent data analysis and communications, via a two-way, automated communications network to analyze what is going on within the grid. Information about the activities of both suppliers and consumers is collected, analyzed, an... » read more

The Interconnect Bottleneck


With communications playing a crucial role in the design and performance of multi-core SoCs, various interconnect structures have been proposed as promising solutions to simplify and optimize SoC design. However, sometimes things don’t go as planned and the interconnect becomes the bottleneck. “Under high utilization cases the DRAM will be over-constrained with requests from all the a... » read more

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