Neuromorphic Hardware Accelerator For Heterogeneous Many-Accelerator SoCs


A technical paper titled “SpikeHard: Efficiency-Driven Neuromorphic Hardware for Heterogeneous Systems-on-Chip” was published by researchers at Columbia University. Abstract: "Neuromorphic computing is an emerging field with the potential to offer performance and energy-efficiency gains over traditional machine learning approaches. Most neuromorphic hardware, however, has been designed wi... » read more

The True Cost Of Software Changes


Safety and security are considered to be important in a growing number of markets and applications. Guidelines are put in place for the processes used to develop either the hardware or the software, but what they seem to ignore is that neither exists in a vacuum. They form a system when put together. Back when I was developing tools for hardware-software co-verification, there were fairly co... » read more

Arm SystemReady Certification System Requirements Specification v2.1


Systems that are designed to “just work” for the end user (with the ability to install and run generic off-the-shelf operating systems out-of-the-box) need to follow a set of minimum hardware and firmware requirements to ensure compatibility. For hardware, the Arm SystemReady Program defines a common Base System Architecture (BSA) specification and a set of market-specific supplements. F... » read more

New Data Management Challenges


An explosion in semiconductor design and manufacturing data, and the expanding use of chips in safety-critical and mission-critical applications, is prompting chipmakers to collect and manage that data more effectively in order to improve overall performance and reliability. This collection of data reveals a number of challenges with no simple solutions. Data may be siloed and inconsistent, ... » read more

Customized Micro-Benchmarks For HW/SW Performance


Raw performance used to be the main focus of benchmarks, but they may have outlived their usefulness for many applications. Dana McCarty, vice president of sales and marketing for AI Inference Products at Flex Logix, talks about why companies need to develop and utilize their own specific models to accurately gauge hardware and software performance, which can be slowed by bottlenecks in I/O and... » read more

Security Gaps In Open Source Hardware And AI


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security risks across multiple market segments with Helena Handschuh, security technologies fellow at Rambus; Mike Borza, principal security technologist for the Solutions Group at Synopsys; Steve Carlson, director of aerospace and defense solutions at Cadence; Alric Althoff, senior hardware security engineer at Tortuga Logic; and Joe Kiniry, princi... » read more

Does HW Vs. SW Choice Affect Quality And Reliability?


Electronic systems comprise both hardware and software. Which functions are implemented with hardware and which with software are decisions made based upon a wide variety of considerations, including concerns about quality and reliability. Hardware may intrinsically provide for higher device quality, but it is also the source of reliability concerns. This is in contrast with popular views of... » read more

Dealing With Security Holes In Chips


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security risks across multiple market segments with Helena Handschuh, security technologies fellow at Rambus; Mike Borza, principal security technologist for the Solutions Group at Synopsys; Steve Carlson, director of aerospace and defense solutions at Cadence; Alric Althoff, senior hardware security engineer at Tortuga Logic; and Joe Kiniry, princi... » read more

Hybrid Prototyping


David Svensson, applications engineer in Synopsys’ Verification Group, explains how a virtual transaction logic model can be connected to develop hardware-dependent drivers before RTL actually exists, why this is now critical for large, complex designs, and how to find the potential bottlenecks and debug both software and hardware. » read more

Hardware Attack Surface Widening


An expanding attack surface in hardware, coupled with increasing complexity inside and outside of chips, is making it far more difficult to secure systems against a variety of new and existing types of attacks. Security experts have been warning about the growing threat for some time, but it is being made worse by the need to gather data from more places and to process it with AI/ML/DL. So e... » read more

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