Mostly Upbeat Outlook For Chips


2019 has started with cautious optimism for the semiconductor industry, despite dark clouds that dot the horizon. Market segments such as cryptocurrencies and virtual reality are not living up to expectations, the market for smart phones appears to be saturated, and DRAM prices are dropping, leading to cut-backs in capital expenditures. EDA companies are talking about sales to China being pu... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 16


Mentor's Harry Foster takes a look at how quickly FPGAs are adopting recent verification techniques, with formal gaining at a rapid pace. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the details of two new RISC-V based cores: Western Digital's open source SweRV and Esperanto's Maxion. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding digs into a recent cybersecurity report from the U.S. government and finds a troubling n... » read more

Speedchip FPGA Chiplets


Next-generation SoC platforms are evolving rapidly to process and move enormous amounts of data from the edge; over the network and to the cloud for high data and compute intensive applications such as AI and machine learning, high-performance computing (HPC) and autonomous driving. As a result, next-generation ASICs need to be larger, faster and further optimized for performance, power and are... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In 2018


What surprised the industry in 2018?  While business has been strong, markets are changing, product categories are shifting and clouds are forming on the horizon. As 2018 comes to a close, most companies are pretty happy with the way everything turned out. Business has been booming, new product categories developing, and profits are meeting or beating market expectations. "2018 was indeed a... » read more

The Rise and Fall of Synthesis Bugs in Safety-Critical FPGAs


For standards IEC 61508 / ISO 26262 / EN 50128 / DO-254. FPGAs are the dominant hardware platform in low-volume, safety-critical applications, including aerospace, and nuclear power plants. Modern FPGAs allow for the implementation of high performance designs with integrated safety mechanisms. This is driving adoption in additional industries, including automotive. Functional safety standard... » read more

Fab Equipment Challenges For 2019


After a period of record growth, the semiconductor equipment industry is facing a slowdown in 2019, in addition to several technical challenges that still need to be resolved. Generally, the equipment industry saw enormous demand in 2017, and the momentum extended into the first part of 2018. But then the memory market began deteriorating in the middle of this year, causing both DRAM and NAND ... » read more

The Cost Of Accuracy


How accurate does a system need to be, and what are you willing to pay for that accuracy? There are many sources of inaccuracy throughout the development flow of electronic systems, most of which involve complex tradeoffs. Inaccuracy leaves an impact on your design in ways you are not even aware of, hidden by best practices or guard-banding. EDA tools also inject some inaccuracy. As the i... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


RISC-V Western Digital announced big plans for RISC-V with a new open source RISC-V core, an open standard initiative for cache coherent memory over a network, and an open source RISC-V instruction set simulator. The SweRV Core features a 2-way superscalar design with a 32-bit, 9 stage pipeline core. It has clock speeds of up to 1.8Ghz on a 28mm CMOS process technology and will be used in vari... » read more

Inferencing In Hardware


Cheng Wang, senior vice president of engineering at Flex Logix, examines shifting neural network models, how many multiply-accumulates are needed for different applications, and why programmable neural inferencing will be required for years to come. https://youtu.be/jb7qYU2nhoo         See other tech talk videos here. » read more

FPGA Graduates To First-Tier Status


Robert Blake, president and CEO of Achronix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about fundamental shifts in compute architectures and why AI, machine learning and various vertical applications are driving demand for discrete and embedded FPGAs. SE: What’s changing in the FPGA market? Blake: Our big focus is developing the next-generation architecture. We started this projec... » read more

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