Blog Review: Jan. 3


Ansys' Steve Pytel argues that increased signaling speeds and frequencies have led to signal integrity issues that circuit simulation alone cannot handle. Cadence's Paul McLellan dives into the details of Intel's 10nm process, including three layers of self-aligned quadruple patterning, contact-over-active-gate, and cobalt for contact fill. Mentor's Ron Press and Vidya Neerkundar argue th... » read more

Which Verification Engine?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of verification with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director of marketing for emulation at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"]; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director for product management at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing at [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solut... » read more

Reflections On 2017: Manufacturing And Markets


People love to make predictions, and most of the time they have it easy, but at Semiconductor Engineering, we ask them to look back on the predictions they make each year and to assess how close to the mark they were. To see what they missed and what surprised them. Not everyone accepts our offer to grade themselves, but many have this year. This is the first of two parts that looks at the pred... » read more

Is Verification Falling Behind?


Every year that [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] is in effect means that the [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"] task gets larger and more complex. At one extreme, verification complexity increases at the square of design complexity, but that assumes that every state in the design is usable and unique. On the other hand, verification has not had the luxury that comes with design reuse b... » read more

Design Chains Will Drive The Top 5 EDA Trends In 2018


In my prediction piece last year, I made seven trend predictions. Looking back, I did very well compared to what actually happened. For 2018, I am cutting it down to five trends that will impact EDA, but in my mind a lot of the trends will be driven by the ever-evolving ecosystem of design chains from IP though semiconductor to systems and to OEMs. While HBO’s 'Game of Thrones' comes to a con... » read more

Mixing Interface Protocols


Continuous and pervasive connectivity requires devices to support multiple interface protocols, but that is creating problems at multiple levels because each protocol is based on a different set of assumptions. This is becoming significantly harder as systems become more heterogeneous and as more functions are crammed into those devices. There are more protocols that need to be supported to ... » read more

The Trouble With Models


Models are becoming more difficult to develop, integrate and utilize effectively at 10/7nm and beyond as design complexity, process variation and physical effects add to the number of variables that need to be taken into account. Modeling is a way of abstracting the complexity in various parts of the semiconductor design, and there can be dozens of models required for complex SoCs. Some are ... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 20


Mentor's Andrew Macleod points out five things that need to happen for autonomous and electric cars to move from R&D and test cases to mass-produced, commercially viable vehicles. Synopsys' Iain Singleton provides some tips on tackling large designs with formal and how the assume-guarantee technique helps split them without masking bugs. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares updates from the... » read more

Pushing DRAM’s Limits


If humans ever do create a genuinely self-aware artificial intelligence, it may well exhibit the frustration of waiting for data arrive. The access bandwidth of DRAM-based computer memory has improved by a factor of 20x over the past two decades. Capacity increased 128x during the same period. But latency improved only 1.3x, according to Kevin Chang, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon Universit... » read more

Accounting For Power Earlier


Concerns about power usage in an SoC are far from new, but the adoption of power management techniques still varies by company and by project. Leading semiconductor providers have made the necessary changes in tooling and methodology to account for [getkc id="106" kc_name="power awareness"] because they have to, but the rest of the industry hasn't necessarily caught up. “The companies t... » read more

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