Rethinking Chip Economics


As process nodes shrink, so does the selection of chips developed at those nodes. Consumers demand more features and functionality, but that carries a high price tag in terms of both complexity and real dollars. In addition, because costs are skyrocketing, there is growing pressure for those chips to remain reliable and up-to-date for longer periods of time. Jayson Bethurem, vice president of m... » read more

Enabling Scalable Accelerator Design On Distributed HBM-FPGAs (UCLA)


A technical paper titled “TAPA-CS: Enabling Scalable Accelerator Design on Distributed HBM-FPGAs” was published by researchers at University of California Los Angeles. Abstract: "Despite the increasing adoption of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in compute clouds, there remains a significant gap in programming tools and abstractions which can leverage network-connected, cloud-scale... » read more

IC Security Issues Grow, Solutions Lag


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the growing chip security threat and what's being done to mitigate it, with Mike Borza, Synopsys scientist; John Hallman, product manager for trust and security at Siemens EDA; Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; and Dave Kelf, CEO of Breker V... » read more

Automated Tool Flow From Domain-Specific Languages To Generate Massively Parallel Accelerators on HBM-Equipped FPGAs


A new technical paper titled "Automatic Creation of High-bandwidth Memory Architectures from Domain-specific Languages: The Case of Computational Fluid Dynamics" was published by researchers at Politecnico di Milano and TU Dresden. The paper states "In this article, we propose an automated tool flow from a domain-specific language for tensor expressions to generate massively parallel acceler... » read more

Selecting The Right RISC-V Core


With an increasing number of companies interested in devices based on the RISC-V ISA, and a growing number of cores, accelerators, and infrastructure components being made available, either commercially or in open-source form, end users face an increasingly difficult challenge of ensuring they make the best choices. Each user likely will have a set of needs and concerns that almost equals th... » read more

Efinix Implements Effective EM/IR Analysis For Leading-Edge FPGA Designs With The MPower Platform


Efinix turned to the Siemens mPower power integrity analysis platform to obtain the capabilities they needed for fast, accurate, full-chip EM/IR analysis of their Titanium FPGA designs. With no artificially enforced digital methodology, and a flat transistor analysis without elaborate views or modeling, the mPower platform analyzes custom layout and P&R IP in a single, seamless run. The mPo... » read more

Complex Tradeoffs In Inferencing Chips


Designing AI/ML inferencing chips is emerging as a huge challenge due to the variety of applications and the highly specific power and performance needs for each of them. Put simply, one size does not fit all, and not all applications can afford a custom design. For example, in retail store tracking, it's acceptable to have a 5% or 10% margin of error for customers passing by a certain aisle... » read more

Put A Data Center In Your Phone!


Datacenters heavily leverage FPGAs for AI acceleration. Why not do the same for low power edge applications with embedded FPGA (eFPGA)? It’s common knowledge for anyone connected to the cloud computing industry that data centers heavily rely on FPGAs for programmable accelerators enabling high performance computing for AI training and inferencing. These heterogeneous computing solution... » read more

Debug This! How To Simplify Coverage Analysis And Closure


For years the process of ASIC and FPGA design and verification debug consisted primarily of comprehending the structure and source code of the design with waveforms showing activity over time, based on testbench stimulus. Today, functional verification is exponentially complex with the emergence of new layers of design requirements (beyond basic functionality) that did not exist years ago — f... » read more

New Uses For AI In Chips


Artificial intelligence is being deployed across a number of new applications, from improving performance and reducing power in a wide range of end devices to spotting irregularities in data movement for security reasons. While most people are familiar with using machine learning and deep learning to distinguish between cats and dogs, emerging applications show how this capability can be use... » read more

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