Power Budgets Optimized By Managing Glitch Power


“Waste not, want not,” says the old adage, and in general, that’s good advice to live by. But in the realm of chip design, wasting power is a fact of physics. Glitch power – power that gets expended due to delays in gates and/or wires – can account for up to 40% of the power budget in advanced applications like data center servers. Even in less high-powered circuits, such as those fou... » read more

2025: So Many Possibilities


The stage is set for a year of innovation in the chip industry, unlike anything seen for decades, but what makes this period of advancement truly unique is the need to focus on physics and real design skills. Planar scaling of SoCs enabled design and verification tools and methodologies to mature on a relatively linear path, but the last few years have created an environment for more radical... » read more

What’s The Best Way To Sell An Inference Engine?


The burgeoning AI market has seen innumerable startups funded on the strength of their ideas about building faster, lower-power, and/or lower-cost AI inference engines. Part of the go-to-market dynamic has involved deciding whether to offer a chip or IP — with some newcomers pivoting between chip and IP implementations of their ideas. The fact that some companies choose to sell chips while... » read more

AI Won’t Replace Subject Matter Experts


Experts at The Table: The emergence of LLMs and other forms of AI has sent ripples through a number of industries, raising fears that many jobs could be on the chopping block, to be replaced by automation. Whether that’s the case in semiconductors, where machine learning has become an integral part of the design process, remains to be seen. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of e... » read more

Why Your Data Center Needs a Digital Twin


The global digital twin market is on a rapid ascent, projected to skyrocket from $11.51 billion in 2023 to $137.67 billion by 2030. Spanning industries from aerospace to healthcare, digital twins are becoming an essential tool for efficient management. But what is a digital twin? Essentially, it’s a digital replica of any real-world entity—a product, system, or process—used for simulation... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 15


Siemens EDA's Stephen V. Chavez argues that the placement of decoupling capacitors on a PCB can make or break a design's power delivery system and provides some best practices and design considerations, such as ensuring even distribution on a board rather than crowding them around chips. Synopsys' Stelios Diamantidis predicts that in 2025, AI agents will begin collaborating with other AI age... » read more

Startup Challenges In A Changing EDA World


The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry is a mature industry, but it's also one that is constantly changing. Each process node and packaging technology advancement places new demands and constraints on existing tools. In addition, changing design problems and paradigms transform how design teams operate, and the goals they target. For a relatively small industry, EDA requires a dispr... » read more

Edge And IoT Security Turning A Corner


Security is beginning to improve for a wide range of IoT and edge devices due to better tools, the implementation of new standards and methodologies, and an increasing level of collaboration and communication across different market segments that in the past had little or no interaction. Until recently, many vendors in cost-sensitive markets offered the bare minimum of security. To make matt... » read more

How Software-Defined Vehicles Change Auto Chip Design


The shift to software-defined vehicles is changing nearly every aspect of automotive design, from what hardware is added into vehicles, when it gets added, and what gets left behind. Moving key features to software rather than hardware allows carmakers to bring new features to market faster, at a lower cost, and to modify those features more quickly. It is also expected to drive up the value... » read more

ISO 26262’s Importance Widens Beyond Automotive


The ISO 26262 standard, which has become a mainstay since the trend toward vehicle electrification really took root a decade ago, is starting to gain traction in markets outside of automotive chip and system design. At the center of this expansion is a focus on safety under a variety of conditions — extreme temperatures, unexpected vibration, or a collision that is unavoidable. This includ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →