Blog Review: September 13


Siemens' Todd Westerhoff highlights the importance of signal integrity analysis in PCB design, challenges as simulation tools have become more sophisticated and difficult to use, and best practices like starting with a simple analysis problem. Synopsys' Rita Horner, Shekhar Kapoor, and William Ruby note that the power and thermal profiles of multi-die systems for HPC and the data center shou... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman Global semiconductor equipment billings dipped 2% year-over-year to US$25.8 billion in Q2, and slipped 4% compared with Q1, according to SEMI. Similarly, the top 10 semiconductor foundries reported a 1.1% quarterly-over-quarter revenue decline in Q2. A rebound is anticipated in Q3, according to TrendForce. Synopsys extended its AI-driven EDA ... » read more

Designing Vehicles Virtually


The shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), electric vehicles (EVs), and ultimately autonomous vehicles (AVs) is proving the value and exposing the weaknesses in simulating individual components and complete vehicles. The ability to model this intensely complex maze of real-world interactions and possible scenarios is improving, and it's happening faster than comparable road-testing o... » read more

Setting Standards For The Chip Industry


For all the advances in semiconductor design, and the astonishing scales on which the industry now works, when it comes to standards committee meetings, not much has changed. Advice from a 91-year-old retired engineer can sound surprisingly like advice from those active today. Standards were then, and continue to be, a mix of technical compromises and corporate politics, as well as passionate a... » read more

AI PCB Design: How Generative AI Takes Us From Constraints To Possibilities


Generative artificial intelligence (AI) represents the next great step forward in PCB design. This is, of course, what you might expect me to say. 2023 has been a year dominated by the rise of generative AI, with large language models (LLMs) as the unquestionable poster child. It’s easy to see why; LLMs seemingly fulfill the promise of sentience, while in reality, they’re simply very goo... » read more

Blog Review: September 6


Cadence's Reela Samuel listens in as industry experts discuss whether generative AI-powered tools could facilitate the creation of diverse chip types and address talent shortages by creating  a more accessible entry point for those interested in circuit, chip, or system design. Synopsys' Ian Land, Jigesh Patel, and Kenneth Larsen find that the way that today’s government, aerospace, and d... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $15.5 billion in funding and loans for retooling existing automotive factories for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and supporting local jobs, plus a notice of intent for $3.5 billion in funding to expand domestic manufacturing of batteries for EVs and the nation’s grid, and for battery materials and components that are currently imported... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Design & IP Arm launched the Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS), pre-integrated and validated configurations of Arm Neoverse platform IP, at this week's Hot Chips conference. CSS helps streamline SoC designs for data centers and is optimized for an advanced 5nm process. The first generation of CSS (Neoverse CSS N2) is based on Arm’s Neoverse N2 platform. Core count is configurable (24 to ... » read more

Need To Share Data Widens In IC Manufacturing


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss issues in smart manufacturing of chips, including data management and grounding, chiplets, and standards, with Mujtaba Hamid, general manager for product management for secure cloud environments at Microsoft; Vijaykishan Narayanan, vice president and general manager of India engineering and operations at proteanTecs; KT Moore,... » read more

Blog Review: August 30


Siemens' Dan Yu examines hallucinations in large language models, the Universal Approximation Theorem, and the role they play in applying LLMs to EDA. Cadence's Mamta Rana introduces shared flow control in PCIe 6.0, which enables the reduced cost implementation of multiple virtual channels by allowing common sets of resources to be shared. Synopsys' Arturo Salz and Johannes Stahl note tha... » read more

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