The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor unveiled new formal-based technologies in the Questa Verification Solution. It offers formal-based RTL-to-RTL equivalence checking flows optimized for verification of manual low-power clock gating, bug fix and ECO validation, and ISO 26262 safety mechanism verification, which the company says which can reduce verification turnaround time by 10X. The app also offers expanded cloc... » read more

Get Ready For Nanotube RAM


The memory market is going in several different directions at once. On one front, the traditional memory types, such DRAM and flash, remain the workhorse technologies in systems despite undergoing some changes in the business. Then, several vendors are readying the next-generation memory types in the market. As part of an ongoing series, Semiconductor Engineering will explore where the new a... » read more

Performance Increasingly Tied To I/O


Speeding up input and output is becoming a cornerstone for improving performance and lowering power in SoCs and ASICs, particularly as scaling processors and adding more cores produce diminishing returns. While processors of all types continue to improve, the rate of improvement is slowing at each new node. Obtaining the expected 30% to 50% boost in performance and lower power no longer can ... » read more

From The Data Center To The Mobile Edge


At the heart of the Internet of Things is the complex interplay between the needs for both low power and high performance (LPHP), a perplexing challenge rooted in the de-facto bifurcation of the IoT itself. For example, lower power mobile devices, systems and lite endpoints make up the vast majority of forward-facing consumer infrastructure, while high-performance servers at the back end are ta... » read more

The Future Of Memory


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss future memory with Frank Ferro, senior director of product management for memory and interface IP at Rambus; Marc Greenberg, director of product marketing at Synopsys; and Lisa Minwell, eSilicon's senior director of IP marketing. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part 1, click here. Part 2 is here. SE: What’s the next big ... » read more

Architecting Memory For Next-Gen Data Centers


The industry’s insatiable appetite for increased bandwidth and ever-higher transfer rates is driven by a burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT), which has ushered in a new era of pervasive connectivity and generated a tsunami of data. In this context, datacenters are currently evaluating a wide range of new memory initiatives. All seek to optimize efficiency by reducing data transport, thus sign... » read more

New Memory Approaches And Issues


New memory types and approaches are being developed and tested as DRAM and Moore's Law both run out of steam, adding greatly to the confusion of what comes next and how that will affect chip designs. What fits where in the memory hierarchy is becoming less clear as the semiconductor industry grapples with these changes. New architectures, such as [getkc id="202" kc_name="fan-outs"] and [getk... » read more

An Insider’s Guide To Planar And 3D DRAM


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about planar DRAMs, 3D DRAMs, scaling and systems design with Charles Slayman, technical leader of engineering at network equipment giant Cisco Systems. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What types of DRAM do network equipment OEMs look at or buy these days? Slayman: When we look at DRAM, we look at it for networking applicatio... » read more

Memory Choices Grow


Memory is becoming one of the starting points for SoC architectures, evolving from a basic checklist item that was almost always in the shadow of improving processor performance or lowering the overall power budget. In conjunction with that shift, chipmakers must now grapple with many more front-end decisions about placement, memory type and access prioritization. There are plenty of rules ... » read more

Overcoming The Design Bottleneck


SoCs control most advanced electronics these days and functionality, quality, power and security are a combination of both hardware and software. All throughout the development of today's complex systems, the memory hierarchy has remained the same—preserving the notion of a continuous computing paradigm. Today, that decision is leading to performance and power issues. There are several rea... » read more

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