Big Shifts In Tech Conferences


By Ed Sperling and Katherine Derbyshire Identifying central themes in technology conferences, or finding enough latitude where the theme is extremely well defined, is becoming challenging throughout the tech industry. Throughout the semiconductor industry, in particular, many are asking how various organizations will differentiate conferences in the future and who will be the target audience... » read more

Safety, Security And PPA Tradeoffs


Safety and security are emerging as key design tradeoffs as chips are added into safety-critical markets, adding even more complexity into an already complicated optimization process. In the early days of semiconductor design, performance and area were traded off against each other. Then power became important, and the main tradeoffs became power, performance and area (PPA). But as chips inc... » read more

Five DAC Keynotes


The ending of Moore's Law may be about to create a new golden age for design, especially one fueled by artificial intelligence and machine learning. But design will become task-, application- and domain-specific, and will require that we think about the lifecycle of the products in a different way. In the future, we also will have to design for augmentation of experience, not just automation... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


CAST debuted an IP subsystem implementing the latest IEEE standards for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) over Ethernet. The TSN_CTRL Subsystem combines three IP cores, a time synchronizer, traffic shaper, and Ethernet MAC. It implements a hardware subsystem that operates without software assistance once programmed. The IP communicates timing information to the system, and allows the system to de... » read more

Wednesday At DAC 2018


Wednesday starts with a visionary talk followed by a keynote. The Visionary talk was given by Chidi Chidambaram, VP of engineering for Qualcomm, and looked at 'Challenges to Enable 5G System Scaling.' "We have to start taking a system view rather than just following technology and at the same time we have to get concerned about durability," he said. "Mobile will continue to be the leader becaus... » read more

DAC 2018: System Design, Cloud And Machine Learning


This marks the 10th DAC that I have covered as a blogger. At DAC 2008 in Anaheim, the industry had just come together behind the SystemC TLM 2.0 standard to enable virtual platforms, finally getting to model interoperability. System design is the common thread that is also present in this year’s DAC in 2018 in San Francisco. But a lot has changed. Big data analytics, artificial intelligence a... » read more

Tuesday At DAC 2018


The morning starts with the Accellera Breakfast. Accellera has made some significant progress this year and we can expect to hear about the approval of the Portable Stimulus 1.0 specification later in the conference as well as the initial release of SystemC CCI as well as a proposal for the creation of an IP Security Assurance Working Group, which will discuss standards development to address s... » read more

Monday At DAC 2018


DAC #55 started with rumors flying. Will this be the last DAC as we know it? Is there a huge chasm forming between academia and the industry? Will DAC be able to make it in Las Vegas where there is no local interest? Of course, those who have been in the industry know that this kind of speculation happens every few years, and in the 80s, Las Vegas was a very popular location for DAC. There was ... » read more

Is It Time To Take Inductance And Electromagnetic Effects On SoCs Seriously?


Electromagnetic (EM) crosstalk impact on SoC performance has been a topic of discussion for a number of years, but how seriously have designers put EM crosstalk detection and avoidance into their SoC design practice? With increasing demand for faster bandwidth, lower power and higher density electronic systems, isn’t it about time to take inductance and EM effects seriously? This topic will b... » read more

New Deep Learning Processors, Embedded FPGA Technologies, SoC Design Solutions


Some of the most valuable events at DAC are the IP Track sessions, which give small and midsize companies a chance to share innovations that might not get much attention elsewhere. The use of IP in SoCs has exploded in recent years. In a panel at DAC 2017, an industry expert noted that the IP market clearly was growing even faster than EDA itself, due to the fact that more and more chip mak... » read more

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