Steering The Semiconductor Industry


Progress in semiconductors has been one of the most successful engineering feats, and the industry has ridden an exponential curve longer than anything else in history. It is also a highly conservative industry that has pushed away many disruptive changes in favor of small incremental changes that minimize risk. There have been significant changes over the decades, and they often required a ... » read more

A Price To Be Paid


Ancient wisdom says you should be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. This was certainly true many times during my career within EDA, and I am sure it is still happening today. Sometimes the outcome was not what was wanted, or the price was higher than expected. As an example, consider VHDL, the language that was meant to correct the problems of Verilog. One of the probl... » read more

Big Design, IP and End Market Shifts In 2020


EDA is on a roll. Design starts are up significantly thanks to increased investment in areas such as AI, a plethora of new communications standards, buildout of the Cloud, the race toward autonomous driving and continued advancements in mobile phones. Many designs demand the latest technologies and push the limits of complexity. Low power is becoming more than just reducing wasted power at t... » read more

Applications, Ecosystems And System Complexity Will Be Key Verification Drivers For 2020


In my predictions blog last year, I focused on verification throughput and its expected growth in 2019. The four areas I predicted we’d see growth in during 2019 were scalable performance, unbound capacity including cloud enablement, smart bug hunting and multi-level abstractions. In 2018, the five key verification drivers that I identified were security, safety, application specificity, proc... » read more

Digital Twins Deciphered


Ever since Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics in 2016, a new phrase has become more common in the semiconductor industry – the digital twin. Exactly what that is, and what impact it will have on the semiconductor industry, is less clear. In fact, many in the industry are scratching their heads over the term. The initial reaction is that the industry has been creating what are now termed digi... » read more

Baum: Finding SoC Power Flaws


A South Korean startup founded by a Samsung engineer-turned-researcher has created a tool that finds power design flaws early in the SoC design process. The startup, Baum, Inc., launched the second version of its power-modeling solution in June at DAC. The product is a power design-verification tool that uses high-level models to create analyses designed to spot design flaws that could creat... » read more

Electronic System-Level Design: Are We There Yet?


I am writing this while attending NI Week in Austin and am admittedly wowed by National Instruments’ open test platform. NI Week’s theme is “Developing the Future Faster.” The Tuesday keynote included guest speakers from Mazda, Honeywell, and NXP, and these were great examples of system-level design of different scopes, from cars to distributed systems to chips enabling them. Personally... » read more

How To Handle Concurrency


The evolution of processing architectures has solved many problems within a chip, but for each problem solved another one was created. Concurrency is one of those issues, and it has been getting much more attention lately. While concurrency is hardly a new problem, the complexity of today’s systems is making it increasingly difficult to properly design, implement and verify the software an... » read more

Portable Stimulus Status Report


The first release of the Portable Stimulus (PS) standard is slated for early next year. If it lives up to its promise, it could be the first new language and abstraction for verification in two decades. [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] uncorked the PS Early Adopter release at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June. The standard has been more than two years in the making by t... » read more

Whatever Happened to High-Level Synthesis?


A few years ago, [getkc id="105" comment="high-level synthesis"] (HLS) was probably the most talked about emerging technology that was to be the heart of a new [getkc id="48" kc_name="Electronic System Level"] (ESL) flow. Today, we hear much less about the progress being made in this area. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss this with Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering for high lev... » read more

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