Solving Memory Subsystem Bottlenecks In 3D Stacks


In today’s do-or-die market environment, many SOC makers strive to differentiate their product based upon the rate at which it performs processing. Closely coupled are power concerns that have led to dominance of a multi-core approach, while economic considerations have resulted in the dominance of the Unified Memory Architecture, where all the processors share access to external DRAM. Stacki... » read more

Experts At The Table: Multi-Foundry Strategies


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design sat down with Walter Ng, vice president of the IP ecosystem at GlobalFoundries; John Murphy, director of strategic alliances marketing at Cadence; Michael Buehler-Garcia, director of Calibre design solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Bob Smith, vice president of marketing and business development at Magma, and Linh Hong, vice president ... » read more

Design For Power Methodology


By Ann Steffora Mutschler It is rare to find an advanced chip today that has not been designed considering power from the very earliest point. In fact, it is safe to say that power is the No. 1 priority, or a close No. 2. But to achieve the highest performance for a low-power design, a design-for-power methodology is necessary, comprised of the capabilities to implement power in the most ef... » read more

Hierarchical LP Design


By Luke Lang The rapidly shrinking process geometry is a double-edged sword. It allows unprecedented integration of circuits. But it also produces leakier transistors, which is one of the main reasons behind the need for low-power design techniques. Therefore, a good low-power design flow must not only automate low-power design, verification, and implementation, it must also support hierarchic... » read more

Aren’t We Beyond That?


The latest and greatest technologies always get the most attention because they are new and fresh, but gate-level simulation—a long-time workhorse tool—is seeing a small comeback with designers as of late. According to Cadence’s Pete Hardee, even though the industry is spending a lot of time looking ahead to architectural-level power modeling and virtual prototyping, the need for detai... » read more

Blog Review: July 20


By Ed Sperling Synopsys’ Eric Huang pays a visit to the Microsoft Store and finds a really smart salesperson who seems to know just about everything there is to know about the products for sale. And yes, that is somewhat unexpected. Cadence’s Jean-Michel Fernandez talks about creating SystemC peripheral models. Fernandez represents Cadence’s Team ESL, which is an interesting developme... » read more

Going With The Flow


It’s hard to judge things in isolation, but a continuum of acquisitions in the low-power area is proving just how important power considerations have become to hardware and software design, verification and manufacturing flows. Over the past couple of years acquisitions by Synopsys in the virtual prototyping arena, and Mentor Graphics in the test and embedded software area, have included p... » read more

Different Ways To Boost Yield


By Ann Steffora Mutschler In the race to get products to market with shortening product cycles, steepening the ramp to yield is critical. The introductory phase of a product is the point at which margins are highest and market share can be most easily gained. This is no surprise to chipmakers. What is surprising is just how much more difficult it has become to achieve acceptable yield quick... » read more

Virtual Prototyping Takes Off


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Skyrocketing software development costs, which for years have been “somebody else’s problem,” are now firmly part of the SoC development teams list of headaches. That has made virtual prototyping far more popular, particularly at 40nm and beyond, where engineers are looking at this approach as a way of managing complexity, doing architectural exploration and eve... » read more

Experts At The Table: Multi-Foundry Strategies


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design sat down with Walter Ng, vice president of the IP ecosystem at GlobalFoundries; John Murphy, director of strategic alliances marketing at Cadence; Michael Buehler-Garcia, director of Calibre design solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Bob Smith, vice president of marketing and business development at Magma, and Linh Hong, vice president ... » read more

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