Chip Industry Talent Shortage Drives Academic Partnerships


Universities around the world are forming partnerships with semiconductor companies and governments to help fill open and future positions, to keep curricula current and relevant, and to update and expand skills for working engineers. Talent shortages repeatedly have been cited as the number one challenge for the chip industry. Behind those concerns are several key drivers, and many more dom... » read more

Blog Review: October 11


Cadence's Sangeeta Soni examines Integrity and Data Encryption (IDE) verification considerations for Compute Express Link (CXL) devices, including MAC generation and handling, key programming and exchange, and early MAC termination. Synopsys' Madhumita Sanyal points to how the increased bandwidth of PCIe 6.0 supports the demanding requirements of AI accelerators. Siemens' Kevin Webb expla... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Liz Allan, and Gregory Haley. TSMC rolled out the second version of its 3Dblox, which creates an infrastructure for stacking chiplets and other necessary components in a package, along with a standardized way of achieving that. Two novel features are chiplet mirroring for design reuse, and what is basically sandbox for power and thermal analysis of different design elements. ... » read more

Formal Verification Best Practices: Investigating A Deadlock


To ensure a design is deadlock free with formal verification, one approach consists in verifying that it is “always eventually” able to respond to a request. The wording is important. Regardless of the current state and the number of cycles we must wait, in the future the design must respond. This translates very nicely using a type of SystemVerilog Assertion called “liveness propertie... » read more

Blog Review: September 27


Siemens' Dirk Hartmann examines how a continual improvement in predictive capability processing and algorithms enables the evolution of simulation performance and highlights two areas that underpin most simulation tools. Synopsys' Ian Land, Jason Niatas, and Marc Serughetti note that digital twins can be used from the chip level through sub-systems and up to the system level to examine perfo... » 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

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

New Concepts Required For Security Verification


Verification for security requires new practices in both the development and verification flows, but tools and methodologies to enable this are rudimentary today. Flows are becoming more complex, especially when they span multiple development groups. Security is special in that it is pervasive throughout the development process, requiring both positive and negative verification. Positive ver... » read more

RISC-V Customization Gets A Standing Ovation


Processor vendors have always tried to create a large software ecosystem around their products, because it creates stickiness and it naturally “locks-in” large numbers of customers who have invested in the creation of dedicated software. This effect is growing over time as the quantity of software is ever increasing per product: we could talk about more than 100 million lines of code in a c... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 23


Siemens' Stephen Chavez discusses best practices when it comes to thermal analysis for PCB design, including component placement and close collaboration between mechanical and electrical engineering disciplines. Synopsys' Gary Ruggles, Richard Solomon, and Varun Agrawal introduce the Compute Express Link (CXL) specification and how it could help improve latency through computational offloadi... » read more

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