The Week In Review: Design


M&A Ansys acquired Computational Engineering International (CEI), the developer of a suite of products that helps analyze, visualize and communicate simulation data. Founded in 1994 as a spin-off from Cray Research, the company's program covers a wide range of data formats. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. IP Efabless launched an open source framework that allows community members... » read more

Transistor Aging Intensifies At 10/7nm And Below


Transistor aging and reliability are becoming much more troublesome for design teams at 10nm and below. Concepts like ‘infant mortality’ and 'bathtub curves' are not new to semiconductor design, but they largely dropped out of sight as methodologies and EDA tools improved. To get past infant mortality, a burn-in process would be done, particularly for memories. And for reliability, which... » read more

Is The IP Industry Healthy?


The semiconductor industry has been through many changes, each designed to reduce the total cost associated with the design and manufacture of chips. Twenty years ago, most companies had their own fabs and designed all of the circuitry on each chip. Today, only a handful of companies still own a fab and outsourcing design, in the form of intellectual property ([getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"]), has... » read more

Blog Review: July 12


Mentor's Puneet Sinha points to five big engineering stumbling blocks in building commercially-viable autonomous vehicles. Synopsys' Anders Nordstrom checks out some exotic applications of formal verification. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on a talk by Cadence's Michelle (Xuehong) Mao on how the company's deep neural network, CactusNet, works for optimizing network architecture. S... » read more

Rethinking Car Design


The automotive industry is undergoing sweeping changes in both technology and business, and functional safety increasingly cuts across both of them. Every safety-critical industry has one or more functional safety standards, whether that is manufacturing, avionics or automotive. In automotive, it's a combination of [gettech id="31076" comment="ISO 26262"] and various ASIL levels, which are a... » read more

Blog Review: July 5


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the current state of System-in-Package technology and how different products incorporate SiP. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi digs into the differences between two major recent ransomware outbreaks, WanaCry and Petya. A Mentor staff writer shares some highlights from this year's DAC. ARM's Rene Haas examines what consumers think about AI and the impact it wil... » read more

Verification Unification


Semiconductor Engineering brought together industry luminaries to initiate the discussion about the role that formal technologies will play with the recently released early adopter's draft of Portable Stimulus and how it may help to bring the two execution technologies closer together. Participating in this roundtable are Joe Hupcey, verification product technologist for [getentity id="22017" e... » read more

EDA Moves Out Of The Shadows


EDA has long harbored ambitions that are larger than a piece of silicon. The engineering challenges being solved on a nanometric scale are remarkably similar to ones being solved at a much higher level—architectural design, layout, validation, verification, debug, thermal mapping, and a lot more. The problem, at least until recently, is that it has been difficult to gain a foothold in larg... » read more

Machine Learning Meets IC Design


Machine Learning (ML) is one of the hot buzzwords these days, but even though EDA deals with big-data types of issues it has not made much progress incorporating ML techniques into EDA tools. Many EDA problems and solutions are statistical in nature, which would suggest a natural fit. So why is it so slow to adopt machine learning technology, while other technology areas such as vision recog... » read more

DAC 2017: A Glimpse Of How The Future Is Enabled


Last week’s Design Automation Conference in Austin gave great examples on how the future is enabled with next generation tools today. My favorite portions were Uhnder’s overview on “Agile Emulation” in the cloud, SirusXM’s presentation on how they used our portfolio of emulation and FPGA-based prototyping, the panel on “Smarter Verification” that I had organized and – of course ... » read more

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