Rethinking Processor Architectures


The semiconductor industry's obsession with clock speeds, cores and how many transistors fit on a piece of silicon may be nearing an end for real this time. The [getentity id="22048" comment="IEEE"] said it will develop the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), effectively setting the industry agenda for future silicon benchmarking and adding metrics that are relevant to specifi... » read more

GPU-Based Computing In Photomask Manufacturing


Graphical-processing unit (GPU)-accelerated computing has reached maturity for professional, scientific computing applications. One example of this is the recent GPU-accelerated thermal application for semiconductor photomask manufacturing, which is used in 24/7 manufacturing environments. GPU-accelerated computing won’t be a universal panacea for the semiconductor industry’s “need for sp... » read more

Q&A With FAA DO-254


Aldec together with FAA DER Randall Fulton conducted a webinar to provide clarifications on some of the most commonly misunderstood objectives and aspects of DO-254. The following is the list of questions that were submitted to Aldec for the webinar. All questions are related to applying DO-254 to FPGAs and PLDs. The answers from Randall Fulton are provided correspondingly. To read more, c... » read more

Charting A New Course For Semiconductors


The semiconductor industry is at an inflection point facing challenges, including rising development costs, shrinking margins, market saturation and unprecedented consolidation. Although no stranger to boom and bust cycles, semiconductor companies are actively seeking a return to stability via a more sustainable and collaborative business paradigm. In this context, Rambus and the Global S... » read more

Debug Becomes A Bigger Problem


The EDA industry has invested enormous amounts of time and energy on the verification process, including new languages, new tools, new class libraries, new methodologies. But the one part of the cycle that defines that type of automation is debug. Development teams are spending half of their time in the debug process and the problem is growing. Part of the reason is that design and debug are... » read more

Reprogrammable, Reprogrammable, Reprogrammable


By Alex Grove I like FPGAs. My first experience with an FPGA was my university final year project where I demonstrated BIST with four Xilinx© 3000 devices; this was before FPGAs had JTAG built in. Filling up these devices with ViewDraw schematics required many hours in front of a terminal. Fast track to today’s advances such as Xilinx UltraScale and Vivado HLx, and I hope you would agree ... » read more

The Problem With CDCs


Part of the Planning Process in DO-254 is knowing the appropriate FPGA tools and capabilities that you need and intend to use for your FPGA design. Particularly if your FPGA device operates with multiple asynchronous clocks which necessitates using advanced verification techniques targeting anomalies related to clock domain crossings (CDCs). Typical electronic design automation (EDA) tools f... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 13


Cooling down FPGAs Georgia Institute of Technology researchers found a way to put liquid cooling a few hundred microns away from where the transistors are operating by cutting microfluidic passages directly into the backsides of production FPGAs. The research, backed by DARPA, is believed to be the first example of liquid cooling directly on an operating high-performance CMOS chip. To ... » read more

New Metrics For The Cloud


Data centers are beginning to adjust their definition of what makes one server better than another. Rather than comparing benchmarked performance of general-purpose servers, they are adding a new level of granularity based upon what kind of chips work best for certain operations or applications. Those decisions increasingly include everything from the level of redundancy in compute operations, ... » read more

FPGA’s Role Expands


For more than a decade FPGA vendors argued that FPGAs would become a viable alternative to ASICs, adding programmability along with the same kind of advances in performance and power that ASICs saw at each new process node. While that never played out as they expected, FPGAs nonetheless have carved out a formidable position in the semiconductor market. Generally speaking, FPGAs today are us... » read more

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