Blog Review: Mar. 20


Cadence's Paul McLellan argues that rapid improvements in the performance of general-purpose computing led to a lack of innovation in domain-specific architectures, but as scaling slows, they're entering a new golden age. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls takes a look at the use of floating point in an embedded application and some of the pitfalls associated with it. Synopsys' Taylor Armer... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 19


Exascale computers Intel and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) have set plans to develop and deliver the first exascale supercomputer in the United States. The system, called Aurora, will provide an exaFLOP of performance or a quintillion floating point computations per second. Targeted for delivery in 2021, the system is being developed at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. The system ... » read more

Isambard Analysis of HPC-Optimized Arm Processors


Written by Simon McIntosh‐Smith, James Price, Tom Deakin, Andrei Poenaru (all from the High Performance Computing Research Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK) In this paper, we present performance results from Isambard, the first production supercomputer to be based on Arm CPUs that have been optimized specifically for HPC. Isambard is the first Cray ... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 13


Mentor's Tom Fitzpatrick questions whether deep learning approaches can really help improve coverage in modern, complex designs. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in at MWC as Huawei chairman Guo Ping defends the company's security practices and shows where its heading in 5G. Synopsys' Eric Huang checks out the newly announced USB4 specification, changes to previous USB names, and a few things ... » read more

Nvidia to Buy Mellanox for $6.9B


Nvidia reached a definitive agreement to acquire Mellanox Technologies for $125 a share in cash, giving the deal an enterprise value of about $6.9 billion. The proposed transaction would complement Nvidia’s product portfolio in high-performance computing for applications in artificial intelligence and big data analytics, with Mellanox’s specialty in providing interconnects for hyperscale da... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers How bad is the slowdown in the IC industry? The memory market is terrible, while other markets are slowing. One company—Renesas--is feeling the brunt. Citing the IC slowdown, Renesas will temporarily halt production at 13 of the company's 14 production facilities, according to a report from Nikkei. Renesas confirmed the move. “Renesas is considering implementing measures to ... » read more

The Next Spoiler Alert


Speculative execution seemed like a good idea at the time. As the power/performance benefits of each node shrink began to dwindle, companies like Intel figured out ways to maintain processor speeds at the same or lower power. There were other approaches, as well. Speculative execution and branch prediction are roughly equivalent to pre-fetch in search, which has gotten so good that often the... » read more

Next Wave Of Security For IIoT


A rush of new products and services promise to make the famously un-secured Industrial IoT (IIoT) substantially more secure in the near future. Although the semiconductor industry has been churning out a variety of security-related products and concepts, ranging from root of trust approaches to crypto processors and physically unclonable functions, most IIoT operations have been slow to adop... » read more

The Other Side Of Makimoto’s Wave


Custom hardware is undergoing a huge resurgence across a variety of new applications, pushing the semiconductor industry to the other side of Makimoto's Wave. Tsugio Makimoto, the technologist who identified the chip industry’s 10-year cyclical swings between standardization and customization, predicted there always will be room in ASICs for general-purpose processors. But it's becoming mo... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 6


Synopsys' Snigdha Dua traces the evolution of memory from SDRAM to DDR5 and the techniques that provide each generation's speed increase. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into the challenges of 112Gbps SerDes, including what makes PAM4 signaling different from NRZ and what goes into equalization and modeling. Mentor's Rich Edelman provides a quick tutorial on how to set up a custom UVM report... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →