Making Cars Better


The automotive industry, with its double-digit growth, is a very attractive market for equipment manufacturers. This growth is explained not only by the increasing number of cars produced for the Asia market, but also by the shift of basic customer expectations for things such as more hybrid and electrical vehicles, more sophisticated infotainment requirements, and more high-end features. O... » read more

Thermal Issues Getting Worse


Making sure that smartphone you’re holding doesn’t burn your face when you make a call requires a tremendous amount of engineering effort at all levels of the design - the case, the chips, the packaging. The developers of the IP subsystems in that smartphone must adhere to very strict power and energy thresholds so the OEM putting it all together can stick to some semblance of a product des... » read more

How To Fix Common Power Problems


As the industry moves to ever more advanced technology nodes, managing power has emerged as a primary challenge in modern SoC design. With smaller nodes, the wires become taller and narrower, which increases the resistivity and leads to more pronounced voltage drop effects. Electro-migration effects are also more severe at advanced nodes, causing serious reliability concerns. Both RTL synthesis... » read more

Executive Insight: Wally Rhines


Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's changing across a wide swath of the industry, where the new opportunities will be, when security will become a real opportunity for EDA, and why Moore's Law will die but progress will continue forever. SE: Looking back over the past year, what's changed and where are the possible r... » read more

Pressure Builds To Revamp The Design Flow


Without [getkc id="7" kc_name="EDA"] there would be no [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] as we know it today, and without Moore's Law there would be a much more limited need for EDA. But after more than three decades of developing design flows packed with sophisticated tools to automate semiconductor design through verification, and thereby enable feature shrinks that are the basis of Moore... » read more

Stacked Die, Phase Two


The initial hype phase of [getkc id="82" kc_name="2.5D"] appears to be over. There are multiple offerings in development or on the market already from Xilinx, Altera, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, AMD, all focused on better throughput over shorter distances with better yield and lower power. Even Intel has jumped on the bandwagon, saying that 2.5D will be essential for extending [getkc id="74" comment="M... » read more

The Wild West Of Automotive


Automotive is considered one of the great new markets for EDA and IP. Electronic complexity is increasing rapidly, product update cycles are decreasing, and new standards mean that many of the old ways of doing development are no longer possible. Such change creates opportunity, along with a certain degreed of confusion. As the number of discrete systems increases, so do costs. Electronics c... » read more

Thermal Is Still Simmering


With the ever increasing sophistication in today’s high-performance [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]s on top of sheer physics of device manufacturing, thermal is a much bigger concern than ever before. It is well understood that thermal and power are closely related, and there exists a vicious cycle between leakage power and temperature: leakage goes up, temperature goes up; temperature goes ... » read more

The Interconnected Web Of Power


Tradeoffs between area and timing used to follow fairly simple rules. You could improve timing by adding area, and occasionally find an architectural solution that would decrease both at the same time. With physical synthesis the relationship became a little more complicated because an increase in area, say to make a drive larger or add another buffer, might upset the layout. That, in turn, cou... » read more

Automotive Drives Novel IP Demands


In the past the automotive industry was a bit sleepy when it came to technologic innovations. Clearly, this is no longer the case. The automotive segment is now driving interesting capabilities and an unprecedented level of creativity by the IP and SoC engineering teams targeting this now-dynamic sector. Historically, electronics for automotive was very different from those aimed at consumer... » read more

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