Engineers Or Their Tools: Which Is Responsible For Finding Bugs?


Experts at the table: Finding and eliminating bugs at the source can be painstaking work, but it can prevent bigger problems later in the design flow, when they are more difficult and expensive to fix.  Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Ashish Darbari, CEO at Axiomise; Ziyad Hanna, corporate vice president R&D at Cadence; Jim Henson, ASIC verification software... » read more

How The Productivity Advantages Of High-Level Synthesis Can Improve IP Design, Verification, And Reuse


Engineering teams are under more pressure than ever before—systems on chip (SoCs) are growing more complex and design schedules are increasingly tighter. With its productivity advantages, high-level synthesis (HLS) has long been touted as part of the solution, but its sweet spot has traditionally been limited to datapath-centric blocks. Moreover, design productivity is only one part of ... » read more

Applying Machine Learning to EDA, FPGA Design Automation Tools


A technical paper titled “Application of Machine Learning in FPGA EDA Tool Development” was published by researchers at the University of Texas Dallas. Abstract: "With the recent advances in hardware technologies like advanced CPUs and GPUs and the large availability of open-source libraries, machine learning has penetrated various domains, including Electronics Design Automation (EDA). E... » read more

Framework for Prototyping And In-Hardware Evaluation of Post-Quantum Cryptography HW Accelerators (TU Darmstadt)


A technical paper titled “PQC-HA: A Framework for Prototyping and In-Hardware Evaluation of Post-Quantum Cryptography Hardware Accelerators” was published by researchers at TU Darmstadt. Abstract: "In the third round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization project, the focus is on optimizing software and hardware implementations of candidate schemes. The winning schemes are ... » read more

Predicting The Future For Semiconductors


Is it possible to predict the future? Of course not. We all make projections of what happened in the past, where they are now, and the implications for the future. We bias that in various ways and think we are making some astounding revelation, which is highly unlikely to become true. Of course, by luck, some people get it right and they are bestowed with grand accolades and awards. The likelih... » read more

The Design Automation Conference Turns 60! What’s Hot? What’s Next?


This coming week from July 9th to July 13th, experts from all over the world will descend on the Moscone Center in San Francisco to discuss aspects of what we call "Electronic Design Automation" (EDA) and typically associate with hardware development. There will be many celebratory elements this year, given the milestone of 60 years. Industry luminary Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli will give o... » read more

Advantages, Disadvantages, And Use Cases Of FPGAs


A technical paper titled “Data Processing with FPGAs on Modern Architectures” was published by researchers at ETH Zürich. Abstract: "Trends in hardware, the prevalence of the cloud, and the rise of highly demanding applications have ushered an era of specialization that is quickly changing the way data is processed at scale. These changes are likely to continue and accelerate in the next... » 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

Using Formal Verification To Optimize HLS-Produced Circuits (ETH Zurich)


A new technical paper titled "Eliminating Excessive Dynamism of Dataflow Circuits Using Model Checking" was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract "Recent HLS efforts explore the generation of dynamically scheduled, dataflow circuits from high-level code; their ability to adapt the schedule at runtime to particular data and control outcomes promises superior performance to standar... » read more

The End Of Closed EDA


In a previous life, I was a technologist for a large EDA company. One of my primary responsibilities in that position involved talking to a lot of customers to identify their pain points, and what new tools we could develop that would ease their problems. You would think that would be an easy task, but it certainly was not the case. For example, if you ask a developer what their biggest frus... » read more

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