Transient Power Problems Rising


Transient power is becoming much more problematic at 10/7nm, adding yet another level of complexity for design teams already wrestling with power issues caused by leakage, a variety of power management techniques to control dynamic power, and leakage current. At each new node there is less headroom for engineering teams to address these problems, and more likelihood that what they do in one ... » read more

What Does “Low Power Optimization” Mean To You?


As I was researching some new low power capabilities, I asked this question of nearly every designer I met: “How important is low power optimization?” It turns out that it’s a pretty useless question because of course it’s important to just about everyone. After all, reducing power improves reliability and reduces design costs. And for chips destined for certain applications, such as mo... » read more

Safety Plus Security: A New Challenge


Nobody has ever integrated safety or security features into their design just because they felt like it. Usually, successive high-profile attacks are needed to even get an industry's attention. And after that, it's not always clear how to best implement solutions or what the tradeoffs are between cost, performance, and risk versus benefit. Putting safety and security in the same basket is a ... » read more

Hardware/Software Tipping Point


It doesn't matter if you believe [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] has ended or is just slowing down. It is becoming very clear that design in the future will be significant different than it is today. Moore's law allowed the semiconductor industry to reuse design blocks from previous designs, and these were helped along by a new technology node—even if it was a sub-optimal solution. I... » read more

Tech Talk: Neural Networks


Megha Daga, senior technical marketing manager at Cadence, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about convolutional neural networks, including the bandwidth and compute challenges associated with them. » read more

Save Time And Minimize Errors By Automating Co-Design And Co-Analysis Of Chips, PCBs, And Packages


Given the complexity of today’s chips, packages, and PCBs, designing each in isolation is no longer judicious. Cross-domain co-design and co-analysis are key to ensuring optimal performance, cost reduction, and faster time to market. Such capabilities are provided by the Cadence Virtuoso System Design Platform, which integrates IC design—including multiple heterogeneous die—into the Alleg... » read more

Blog Review: June 7


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on Jeff Bier's Embedded Vision Summit keynote, where he argues the cost and power consumption of vision computing will decrease by about 1000X in the next three years. Synopsys' Sean Safarpour points to three reasons formal has grown in the last ten years to become a standard part of the verification toolbox. Mentor's Matthew Balance checks out the abili... » read more

Testing IoT Devices


Internet of Things devices present new challenges in testing. Some devices can be tested the same way as standard semiconductors are now tested, but others call for different approaches. Microcontrollers and other chips that go into safety-critical applications — medical devices, military/aerospace systems, and automotive electronics — need their own kind of testing to make sure they wil... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools OneSpin revealed new formal applications focused on random fault verification for safety critical analysis in automotive and other mission-critical applications. The Fault Injection App provides controlled injection of faults and assertion mapping to associated fault scenarios, as well as visibility into corrupted design behavior. The Fault Detection App allows the detection of dangerous... » read more

Automotive’s Unsung Technology


Sound systems are becoming a critical design element in vehicles, and not just for music. Thanks to evolving technology, automotive audio has reached a point where it is taking on a much broader role for applications both within and outside the vehicle. Most people associate automotive audio with the car radio, which has been a fixture in cars for decades. But in the future, these systems al... » read more

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