Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility General Motors is working on a next version of Ultium battery chemistry and announced a joint development agreement with Singapore-based SolidEnergy Systems, a lithium metal battery startup founded by a graduate of MIT. The companies plan to open a Woburn, Massachusetts prototype production line by 2023. GM’s is attempting to lower the cost of its proprietary battery tech... » read more

Tradeoffs To Improve Performance, Lower Power


Generic chips are no longer acceptable in competitive markets, and the trend is growing as designs become increasingly heterogeneous and targeted to specific workloads and applications. From the edge to the cloud, including everything from vehicles, smartphones, to commercial and industrial machinery, the trend increasingly is on maximizing performance using the least amount of energy. This ... » read more

Die-To-Die Chiplet Communication


At CadenceLIVE Americas 2020, one of the most viewed videos was by Samsung Foundry's Kevin Yee and Cadence's Tom Wong, titled "Let’s Talk About Chips (Chiplets), Baby…It’s All About D2D!" They went for this title because it reminded them of the lyrics of an '80s song...which they proceeded to sing. Process and packaging trends Tom led off with a look at the trends in semiconducto... » read more

Multiband Active Antenna Tuner For Cellular IoT Applications


This white paper discusses related design challenges and solutions for developing a multiband active antenna tuner for cellular internet of things (IoT) massive machine-type communications (mMTC) applications. Click here to read more. » read more

Blog Review: March 10


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster checks out how the maturity of verification processes impact bug escapes in FPGA designs and whether safety critical development processes prevent bugs from escaping to silicon. Synopsys' Dennis Kengo Oka examines the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in automotive keyless entry systems and how security researchers hacked the Tesla Model X key fob. Cadence's Paul M... » read more

Design Issues For Chips Over Longer Lifetimes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the myriad challenges associated with chips used in complex systems over longer periods of time them with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director for the Emulation Division at Siemens EDA; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director for solution marketing at Cadence; Maurizio Griva, R&D Manager at Reply; and Laurent Maillet-Contoz, system and architec... » read more

Challenges Of Using The Cloud For IC Design


The ‘cloud’ is so ubiquitous that perhaps even your grandmother has heard about it. There are advertisements on TV with various vendors touting their cloud offerings. The cloud is ideal for eCommerce and SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings, as the elasticity on demand provides a convenient way to scale up when demand is high and scale down when it is low. Yet the design community has ... » read more

Auto OEMs Face New Competitive Threats


Automotive design and manufacturing are undergoing a fundamental shift to the left as cars increasingly are electrified and chips take over more functions formerly done by mechanical parts, setting the stage for massive disruption across a supply chain that has been in place for decades. The success of Tesla — a company that had never actually built a chip or a car — was both a surprise ... » read more

Self-Driving Cars In San Francisco


You probably have heard that Waymo has completely driverless (no safety driver) taxis serving Phoenix. 600 of them. But you can't go and buy one. Why is that? Paul Graham, the founder of the incubator Y Combinator, is celebrated for many reasons, but two things he has said have become mantra in the startup world: Build something people want. Do things that don't scale. When it comes ... » read more

Blog Review: March 3


Siemens EDA's Ray Salemi considers incrementalism in engineering, the transition from drawing circuits to writing RTL, and the next big leap of using proxy-driven testbenches written in Python. Cadence's Shyam Sharma looks at key changes from LPDDR5 in the LPDDR5X SDRAM standard, which extends clock frequencies to include 937MHz and 1066MHz resulting in max data rates of 7500MT/s and 8533 MT... » read more

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