Why IC Design Safety Nets Have Limits


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss different responsibilities in design teams and future changes in tools with Ashish Darbari, CEO at Axiomise; Ziyad Hanna, corporate vice president R&D at Cadence; Jim Henson, ASIC verification software product manager at Siemens EDA; Dirk Seynhaeve, vice president of business development at Sigasi; Simon Davidmann, formerly... » read more

RISC-V Heralds New Era Of Cooperation


RISC-V is paving the way for open source to become accepted within the hardware community, creating a level of industry collaboration never seen in the past, while revitalizing the connection between academia and industry. The big question is whether this arrangement is just a placeholder while the industry re-learns how to develop processors, or whether this processor architecture is someth... » read more

EDA Back On Investors’ Radar


EDA is transforming from a staid but strategic sector into a hot investment market, fueled by strong earnings and growth, a clamoring for leading-edge and increasingly customized designs across new and existing markets, and the rollout of advanced technologies such as AI for a range of tools that will be needed to develop new architectures with much greater performance per watt. A confluence... » read more

Top Tech Videos of 2023


In 2023, heterogeneous integration, RISC-V, and advanced node logic scaling and advanced packaging dominated the semiconductor industry. All of those topics spurred deep discussions at conferences, and they were the subject of Semiconductor Engineering's most popular videos. Of the videos published in 2023, here are the highlights from our five channels: Manufacturing, Packaging & Mater... » read more

Dramatic Changes Ahead For Chips And Systems


Early this year, most people had never heard of generative AI. Now the entire world is racing to capitalize on it, and that's just the beginning. New markets, such as spatial computing, quantum computing, 6G, smart infrastructure, sustainability, and many more are accelerating the need to process more data faster, more efficiently, and with much more domain specificity. Compared to the days ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan Synopsys acquired Imperas, pushing further into the RISC-V world with Imperas' virtual platform technology for verifying and emulating processors. Synopsys has been building up its RISC-V portfolio, starting with ARC-V processor IP and a full suite of tools introduced last month. The first high-NA EUV R&D center in the U.S. will be built at... » read more

Data Formats For Inference On The Edge


AI/ML training traditionally has been performed using floating point data formats, primarily because that is what was available. But this usually isn't a viable option for inference on the edge, where more compact data formats are needed to reduce area and power. Compact data formats use less space, which is important in edge devices, but the bigger concern is the power needed to move around... » read more

AI Accelerator Architectures Poised For Big Changes


AI is driving a frenzy of activity in the chip world as companies across the semiconductor ecosystem race to include AI in their product lineup. The challenge now is how to make AI run faster, use less energy, and to be able to leverage it from the edge to the data center — particularly with the rollout of large language models. On the hardware side, there are two main approaches for accel... » read more

EDA Pushes Deeper Into AI


EDA vendors are ramping up the use of AI/ML in their tools to help chipmakers and systems companies differentiate their products. In some cases, that means using AI to design AI chips, where the number and breadth of features and potential problems is exploding. What remains to be seen is how well these AI-designed chips behave over time, and where exactly AI benefits design teams. And all o... » read more

The Evolution Of RISC-V Processor Verification: Open Standards And Verification IP


The OpenHW Group’s [1] Verification task group has been a pioneer in the development of methodologies and verification collateral for RISC-V processor verification. Since 2019 the members have worked together to develop CORE-V-VERIF: a UVM environment for the verification of RISC-V processor cores. Over this period of time the CORE-V-VERIF environment has evolved as new processor verification... » read more

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