Blog Review: Feb. 8


Cadence's Sanjeet Kumar points to key changes and optimizations that are done for USB3 Gen T compared to USB3 Gen X tunneling in order to minimize tunnel overhead and maximize USB3 throughput. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster considers the effectiveness of IC and ASIC verification by looking at schedule overruns, number of required spins, and classification of functional bugs. Synopsys' Chris C... » read more

Hunting For Hardware-Related Errors In Data Centers


The semiconductor industry is urgently pursuing design, monitoring, and testing strategies to help identify and eliminate hardware defects that can cause catastrophic errors. Corrupt execution errors, also known as silent data errors, cannot be fully isolated at test — even with system-level testing — because they occur only under specific conditions. To sort out the environmental condit... » read more

Chip Industry’s Earnings Roundup


Editor's Note: Updated throughout February 2023 for additional earnings releases. Many companies reported revenue growth in the most recent quarter, but the latest round of chip industry earnings releases reflected some major themes: Demand for consumer electronics softened due to inflation, rising interest rates, and post-pandemic market saturation, creating a slump in the memory chip ... » read more

Week in Review: Design, Low Power


Intel discontinued its Pathfinder for RISC-V program, according to numerous reports. The program provided a pre-silicon development environment to support IP selection and early-stage software development using Intel FPGA and simulator platforms. "Since Intel will not be providing any additional releases or bug fixes, we encourage you to promptly transition to third-party RISC-V software tools ... » read more

Solving Problems With The IoT


The Internet of Things, a term once applied to almost any "smart" gadget connected to the Internet, is becoming more useful, more complex, and more of a security risk as the value of data continues to grow and more people depend on IoT technology. In the decades since the concept was first introduced, IoT devices have become so ubiquitous that applications cover practically every consumer, c... » read more

Improving Performance And Power With HBM3


HBM3 swings open the door to significantly faster data movement between memory and processors, reducing the power it takes to send and receive signals and boosting the performance of systems where high data throughput is required. But using this memory is expensive and complicated, and that likely will continue to be the case in the short term. High Bandwidth Memory 3 (HBM3) is the most rece... » read more

CXL Picks Up Steam In Data Centers


CXL is gaining traction inside large data centers as a way of boosting utilization of different compute elements, such as memories and accelerators, while minimizing the need for additional racks of servers. But the standard is being extended and modified so quickly that it is difficult to keep up with all the changes, each of which needs to be verified and validated across a growing swath of h... » read more

Supply Chain Collaboration Key To Making Chip Industry More Sustainable


Coming in the wake of the COP27, the Smart and Green Manufacturing Summit at SEMICON Europa 2022 (Munich, 15-17 November) had a timely focus on the semiconductor industry’s contribution to meeting the United Nations’ target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, in an industry as large and valuable as semiconductors, social as well as environmental imp... » read more

The Path To Known Good Interconnects


Chiplets and heterogenous integration (HI) provide a compelling way to continue delivering improvements in performance, power, area, and cost (PPAC) as Moore’s Law slows, but choosing the best way to connect these devices so they behave in consistent and predictable ways is becoming a challenge as the number of options continues to grow. More possibilities also bring more potential interac... » read more

Selecting The Right RISC-V Core


With an increasing number of companies interested in devices based on the RISC-V ISA, and a growing number of cores, accelerators, and infrastructure components being made available, either commercially or in open-source form, end users face an increasingly difficult challenge of ensuring they make the best choices. Each user likely will have a set of needs and concerns that almost equals th... » read more

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