Bespoke Silicon Rattles Chip Design Ecosystem


Bespoke silicon developers are shaking up relationships, priorities, and methodologies across the semiconductor industry, creating demand for skills that cross traditional boundaries, and driving new business models that leverage these enormous investments. Bespoke silicon designers today are a rare breed, capable of understanding the unique requirements of a specific domain, as well as a gr... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Trade regulations/legal The U.S. government placed new restrictions on sales of GPUs to China that could be used for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and other advanced applications. NVIDIA said in an SEC filing Wednesday that officials told the company it must seek an export license for sales to China or Russia of its A100 and H100 chips, and any system that includes those... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued new export controls on EDA software aimed at designing gate-all-around FETs, which manufacturers plan to implement starting at 3nm (Samsung) and 2nm (Intel and TSMC). Specifically, the ruling controls export of software that is specially designed for implementing RTL to GDSII (or an equivalent standard) for GAA FET desi... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Quantum Computing Researchers in China are putting a damper on Google’s claims of achieving quantum supremacy after they were able to use normal processors to complete a difficult calculation in a few hours. Sycamore, Google’s quantum computer, completed the same calculation in a few minutes back in 2019, but the company said it would take a supercomputer more than 10,000 years to do the... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Redefines Custom ASICs


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss bespoke silicon and what's driving that customization with Kam Kittrell, vice president of product management in the Digital & Signoff group at Cadence; Rupert Baines, chief marketing officer at Codasip; Kevin McDermott, vice president of marketing at Imperas; Mo Faisal, CEO of Movellus; Ankur Gupta, vice president and general manager of Siemens... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Cadence will acquire Future Facilities, a provider of electronics cooling analysis and energy performance optimization solutions for data center design and operations using physics-based 3D digital twins. Future Facilities’ product portfolio includes an electronics thermal solution, as well as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) electronics cooling simulation technology that op... » read more

IC Reliability Burden Shifts Left


Chip reliability is coming under much tighter scrutiny as IC-driven systems take on increasingly critical and complex roles. So whether it's a stray alpha particle that flips a memory bit, or some long-dormant software bugs or latent hardware defects that suddenly cause problems, it's now up to the chip industry to prevent these problems in the first place, and solve them when they do arise. ... » read more

Why Hardware-Dependent Software Is So Critical


Hardware and software are two sides of the same coin, but they often live in different worlds. In the past, hardware and software rarely were designed together, and many companies and products failed because the total solution was unable to deliver. The big question is whether the industry has learned anything since then. At the very least, there is widespread recognition that hardware-depen... » read more

EDA On Cloud Presents Unique Challenges


Discussions about cloud-based EDA tools are heating up for both hardware and software engineering projects, opening the door to vast compute resources that can be scaled up and down as needed. Still, not everyone is on board with this shift, and even companies that use the cloud don't necessarily want to use it for every aspect of chip design. But the number of cloud-based EDA tools is growi... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


From pandemic to war — some of the news this week highlights reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Pervasive computing, IoT, 5G and beyond SpaceX sent Starlink satellite dishes to Ukraine to enable Ukrainian access to the Internet. The caveat is the uplink signals from satellite equipment can be used to triangulate the position of the dish, which can then be hit by missile. The dis... » read more

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