Don’t Get Stranded On Islands, Delete Them


No, this isn’t a Hollywood movie. We’re talking about pieces of plane shapes with no connections to them, not an idyllic private oasis in the Caribbean (sorry). Removing shape islands is something you’ve always been able to do in the Allegro layout environments, but the flow for achieving this has improved significantly in recent years. Come with us, and we’ll compare what the flow u... » read more

New Ways To Optimize Machine Learning


As more designers employ machine learning (ML) in their systems, they’re moving from simply getting the application to work to optimizing the power and performance of their implementations. Some techniques are available today. Others will take time to percolate through the design flow and tools before they become readily available to mainstream designers. Any new technology follows a basic... » read more

Blog Review: April 1


Rambus' Steven Woo takes an in-depth look at on-chip memory for high performance AI applications and explores some of the primary differences between HBM and GDDR6. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns of the risks of legacy vulnerabilities, where software has problems that were never fixed then forgotten about or never discovered in the first place, and key steps for finding and addressing them... » read more

Medical, Industrial & Aerospace IC Design Changes


Medical, industrial and aerospace chips are becoming much more complex as more intelligence is added into these devices, forcing design teams to begin leveraging tools and methodologies that typically have been used only at the leading-edge nodes for commercial applications. But as with automotive, the needs of these systems are changing quickly. In addition to strict quality, safety and sec... » read more

Why It’s So Hard To Create New Processors


The introduction, and initial success, of the RISC-V processor ISA has reignited interest in the design of custom processors, but the industry is now grappling with how to verify them. The expertise and tools that were once in the market have been consolidated into the hands of the few companies that have been shipping processor chips or IP cores over the past 20 years. Verification of a pro... » read more

Making Sense Of EDA And Digital Twins


There is a new buzzword in town, “digital twins.” I have been using it for a while now in the context of system-on-chip (SoC) verification as well as a little more broadly when it comes to security issues for data in general. There are some differences in emphasis across different vertical domains, based on when they are used during the life cycle, which use models are desired and what scop... » read more

Software-Defined Hardware Gains Ground — Again


The traditional approach of running generic software on x86-based CPUs is running out of steam for many applications due to the slowdown of Moore’s Law and the concurrent exponential growth in software application complexity and scale. In this environment, the software and hardware are disparate due the dominance of the x86 architecture. “The need for and advent of the hardware accelerat... » read more

Do You Trust Your IP Supplier?


How much do you trust your IP supplier, regardless of whether IP was developed in-house or by a third-party provider? And what implications does it have a system integrator? These are important questions that many companies are beginning to ask. Today, there are few methods, other than documentation, that provide the necessary information. The software industry may be ahead of the hardware i... » read more

Intelligent System Design


Electronics technology is proliferating to new, creative applications and appearing in our everyday lives. To compete, system companies are increasingly designing their own semiconductor chips, and semiconductor companies are delivering software stacks, to enable substantial differentiation of their products. This trend started in mobile devices and is now moving into cloud computing, automotiv... » read more

Blog Review: March 25


Rambus' Steven Woo checks out common memory systems that are used in the highest performance AI applications and points to the differences between on-chip memory, HBM, and GDDR. Mentor's Colin Walls considers whether software for embedded systems should be delivered as a binary library or source code and warns of some key potential issues when requesting source code. A Synopsys writer poi... » read more

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