Tech Talk: 7nm Process Variation


Ankur Gupta, director of field applications at ANSYS, discusses process variation and the problems it can cause at 10/7nm and beyond. https://youtu.be/WHNjFr1Da6s » read more

Which Verification Engine?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of verification with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director of marketing for emulation at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"]; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director for product management at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Dave Kelf, vice president of marketing at [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solut... » read more

Is Verification Falling Behind?


Every year that [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] is in effect means that the [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"] task gets larger and more complex. At one extreme, verification complexity increases at the square of design complexity, but that assumes that every state in the design is usable and unique. On the other hand, verification has not had the luxury that comes with design reuse b... » read more

Enabling Synchronized Hardware Software Debug With Verdi


Verdi HW SW Debug is an instruction-accurate embedded processor debug solution that offers fully synchronized views between hardware, as RTL or gate-level design models, and software, as C or assembly code enabling co-debug between RTL and software. To read more, click here. » read more

Big Challenges, Changes For Debug


By Ann Steffora Mutschler & Ed Sperling Debugging a chip always has been difficult, but the problem is getting worse at 7nm and 5nm. The number of corner cases is exploding as complexity rises, and some bugs are not even on anyone's radar until well after devices are already in use by end customers. An estimated 39% of verification engineering time is spent on debugging activities the... » read more

Electromagnetic (EM) Crosstalk Analysis: Unlocking the Mystery


Ignoring electromagnetic crosstalk is highly risky and can cause significant time-to-market delays as well significant cost over runs. Most current SoC design flows fundamentally ignore inductance and EM effects, and the term “EM crosstalk analysis” may sound Greek to them. This short article provides a quick overview of the basic steps involved in doing EM crosstalk analysis as part of an ... » read more

A Simple Way To Debug IIP-Based Designs And SoCs


Design problems that appear in the late phases of the development cycle can be extremely difficult to track down and debug, thus putting project schedules at risk. This whitepaper presents the concept of debugging with “real time simulation data” using Verdi Transaction Debug Platform (protocol analyzer, waveform viewer, source code browser) and show its benefits by taking a few generic USB... » read more

SerDes Signal Integrity Challenges At 28Gbps And Beyond


After nearly fifty years, NRZ technology continues to pose significant challenges as data rates approach 56Gbps and refreshed standards mandate increased receiver sensitivity (down to 35 mV). With shorter unit intervals and closing eyes, triggering becomes ever more complex and requires enhanced receiver equalization such as continuous-time-linear equalization and decision feedback equalization... » read more

Extracting Maximum Performance From Hardware


The Arm DS-5 Streamline performance analyzer provides system performance metrics, software tracing, and statistical profiling to help engineers get the most performance from hardware and find important bottlenecks in software. The Raspberry Pi 3 is one of the easiest systems for learning Streamline, and a quad-core Cortex-A53 also makes it a good target for learning Linux development. Many o... » read more

Focus Shifts To System Quality


For the past decade, many semiconductor industry insiders predicted that software would take over the world and hardware would become commoditized. The pendulum seems to have stopped, and if anything, it is reversing course. Initial predictions were based on several advantages for software. First, software is easier to modify and patch. Second, universities turn out far more software develop... » read more

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