The Race To Design Larger Systems


For more than a decade, tools vendors and design houses have been talking about leveraging their tools and expertise to help design systems of systems. They're finally getting their chance. The basic idea behind this strategy has always been that issues inside any electronic system—performance, power, signal integrity, area—have all been dealt all the way down to the sub-atomic level in ... » read more

Building AI SoCs


Ron Lowman, strategic marketing manager at Synopsys, looks at where AI is being used and how to develop chips when the algorithms are in a state of almost constant change. That includes what moves to the edge versus the data center, how algorithms are being compressed, and what techniques are being used to speed up these chips and reduce power. https://youtu.be/d32jtdFwpcE    ... » read more

Carmakers To Chipmakers: Where’s The Data?


The integration of electronics into increasingly autonomous vehicles isn't going nearly as smoothly as the marketing literature suggests. In fact, it could take years before some of these discrepancies are resolved. The push toward full autonomy certainly hasn't slowed down, but carmakers and the electronics industry are approaching that goal from very different vantage points. Carmakers and... » read more

Adding Safety Into Automotive Design


The ISO 26262 spec is a household term for anyone even remotely involved with the automotive industry today. Increasingly, though, it is being used interchangeably with safety-readiness across the entire supply chain. ISO 26262 compliance is a prerequisite for IP and chips used in an increasing number of automotive applications. It applies to systems, software, and to individual products. An... » read more

Effectively Managing Maintenance Cost For Low-Touch IPs


Semiconductor design houses are in a race to differentiate themselves by integrating and delivering more functionality in their SoCs while addressing the common concerns of power, performance and cost. This global race has led to a steep rise in the number of design IPs integrated in any given SoC. As generations of SoCs are churned out, some of the design IPs repeatedly used in them reach a... » read more

Data Converters For Automotive Applications


Sensor applications requiring data converters range from temperature sensors identifying different engine status to radar/LIDAR enabling Automotive Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Other applications involving data converters include wireless transceivers for communicating with other vehicles or with a fixed network. The data converter IP (analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog) provides an i... » read more

Arm Enterprise Virtualization With Arm System IP, Backplane Integration And Performance


Virtualization has become ubiquitous across the infrastructure market, increasing efficiency and security, boosting productivity and reducing operating costs. However, system performance remains crucial to ensuring a virtualized environment does not affect the end user’s experience. Performance within this environment depends on a number of factors such as transaction bandwidth, latencies an... » read more

EDA, IP Revenues Up Again


EDA and IP revenues were up across the board yet again, buoyed by growth across a number of new markets and an increase in new and existing companies developing chips for those markets. All told, revenue grew to $2.39 billion in Q2 of 2018, an 8.2% increase over the $2.21 billion reported in the same period in 2017, according to numbers released today by the ESD Alliance's Market Statistics ... » read more

RISC-V Inches Toward The Center


RISC-V is pushing further into the mainstream, showing up across a wide swath of designs and garnering support from a long and still-growing list of chipmakers, tools vendors, universities and foundries. In most cases it is being used as a complementary processor than a replacement for something else, but that could change in the future. What makes RISC-V particularly attractive to chipmaker... » read more

Betting Big On Discontinuity


Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the booming chip industry, what's driving it, how long it will last and what changes are ahead in EDA and chip architectures. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The EDA and semiconductor industries are doing well right now. What's driving that growth? Rhine... » read more

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