Domain-Specific Design Drives EDA Changes


The chip design ecosystem is beginning to pivot toward domain-specific architectures, setting off a scramble among tools vendors to simplify and optimize existing tools and methodologies. The move reflects a sharp slowdown in Moore's Law scaling as the best approach for improving performance and reducing power. In its place, chipmakers — which now includes systems companies — are pushing... » read more

IC Security Threat Grows As More Devices Are Connected


Designing for security is beginning to gain traction across a wider swath of chips and systems as more of them are connected to the Internet and to each other, sometimes in safety- and mission-critical markets where the impact of a cyber attack can be devastating. But it's also becoming more difficult to design security into these systems. Unlike in the past, connectivity is now considered e... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Synopsys revealed DSO.ai (Design Space Optimization AI), an autonomous AI application that searches for optimization targets in very large solution spaces of chip design, inspired by the process of DeepMind's game-playing AlphaZero. DSO.ai engines ingest large data streams generated by chip design tools and use them to explore search spaces, observing how a design evolves over t... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — health An injectable biosensor may someday help measure signs of influenza. DARPA (the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and digital health startup Profusa announced a study that uses Profusa’s Lumee Oxygen Platform to find ways to identify flu outbreaks, biological attacks and pandemics as much as three weeks earlier than curre... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance Vectra raised $36 million in Series D funding led by Atlantic Bridge Capital. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund and Nissho Electronics also participated in this funding round along with returning investors Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, IA Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Wipro Ventures, bringing Vectra’s total funding to date to $123 million. Vectra will use the... » read more