Improving Simulation Throughput Using The Xcelium Parallel Logic Simulator


Simulators have been around for a long time. First, there were interpreters in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and despite being relatively slow, they were a big step up from fabricating the design and hoping it worked. However, as designs continued to increase in size, the interpreters could not keep up with simulation needs, and innovation was required for simulators to keep pace with new technology. ... » read more

Speed Up P2P Resistance Debugging With Selective Highlighting


Point-to-point (P2P) resistance simulation calculates the effective parasitic resistance from one or more specified points (sources) to another set of points (sinks) on an integrated circuit (IC) layout. The results of these simulations are a key component in the verification of the robustness and reliability of IC layout interconnect—designers must have this information to accurately perform... » read more

ATE Lab To Fab


Shu Li, business development manager at Advantest, zeroes in on the communication gap between engineers on the design side and the manufacturing/test side, why it exists, and what needs to be done to bridge that gap in order to speed up and improve test quality. https://youtu.be/Nd-5_twbJBw     See other tech talk videos here » read more

Blog Review: April 17


In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls digs into power management in embedded software with a particular look at the Power Pyramid model. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding checks out the state of application security at this year's RSA and finds that while organizations are paying attention to security through training and dedicated teams, roadblocks still remain. Cadence's Paul McLellan considers how... » read more

Exascale Emulation Debug Challenges


For years, semiconductor industry surveys have shown that functional verification is the dominant phase in chip development and that debug is the most time-consuming task for verification. The problem is getting worse in today’s era of exascale debug, in which software applications drive tests of more than a billion cycles run in emulation on designs of more than a billion gates. System-on-ch... » read more

From AI Algorithm To Implementation


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the role that EDA has in automating artificial intelligence and machine learning with Doug Letcher, president and CEO of Metrics; Daniel Hansson, CEO of Verifyter; Harry Foster, chief scientist verification for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Manish Pandey, Synopsys fellow; and Raik Brinkmann, CEO ... » read more

Utilizing More Data To Improve Chip Design


Just about every step of the IC tool flow generates some amount of data. But certain steps generate a mind-boggling amount of data, not all of which is of equal value. The challenge is figuring out what's important for which parts of the design flow. That determines what to extract and loop back to engineers, and when that needs to be done in order to improve the reliability of increasingly com... » read more

Debug Changes At Advanced Nodes


Ribhu Mittal, emulation applications director at Synopsys, zeroes in on what’s changing in debug, including why traditional verification methods are failing in designs with 1 billion gates and a commensurate amount of software complexity. The key is how to maintain or reduce time to market, and that requires a different way of approaching the problem. » read more

The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance


The open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) continues to gain momentum, but the flexibility of RISC-V creates a problem—how do you know if a RISC-V implementation fits basic standards and can play well with other implementations so they all can run the same ecosystem? In addition, how do you ensure that ecosystem development works for all implementations and that all cores that ... » read more

Can Debug Be Tamed?


Debug consumes more time than any other aspect of the chip design and verification process, and it adds uncertainty and risk to semiconductor development because there are always lingering questions about whether enough bugs were caught in the allotted amount of time. Recent figures suggest that the problem is getting worse, too, as complexity and demand for reliability continue to rise. The... » read more

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