Packaging Enters New Phase


The race is on to make advanced packaging less expensive than shrinking everything down onto the same die—much less expensive, in fact. Following several years of speculation and rather shaky market predictions at the beginning of this decade, packaging houses and foundries spent the last four years proving that packaging really does provide a viable alternative to shrinking die in terms o... » read more

IP Business Changing As Markets Shift


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IP protection, tracking and reuse with Srinath Anantharaman, CEO of [getentity id="22203" e_name="ClioSoft"]; and Jeff Galloway, CTO of Silicon Creations; Marc Greenberg, group director of product marketing for [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]'s IP Group; and John Koeter, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"... » read more

How To Close Timing With An eFPGA Hosted In An SoC


eFPGAs are embeddable IP that include look-up tables, memories, and DSP building blocks, allowing designers to add a programmable logic fabric to their SoC. The Speedcore IP can be configured to any size as dictated by the end application. The SoC supplier defines the number of LUTs, memory resources, and DSP64 blocks for their Speedcore instance. A short time later, Achronix delivers the IP as... » read more

Hybrid Emulation


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the growing usage of hybrid verification approaches with Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director of product management & marketing for [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Russ Klein, program director for pre-silicon debug products at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"]; [getperson id="11027" comment="Phil Moorby"],... » read more

What Does An IoT Chip Look Like?


By Ed Sperling and Jeff Dorsch Internet of Things chip design sounds like a simple topic on the face of it. Look deeper, though, and it becomes clear there is no single IoT, and certainly no type of chip that will work across the ever-expanding number of applications and markets that collectively make up the IoT. Included under this umbrella term are sensors, various types of processors, ... » read more

IoT Myth Busting


The [getkc id="76" comment="Internet of Things"] (IoT) means many things to a large number of people, but one thing is clear—every discussion involving the IoT invariably includes some rather dramatic growth predictions for how many connected devices will be sold and who will be the primary beneficiaries. While that data helps spice up speeches, and typically gets people to read and quote ... » read more

How The Evolution Of SoC Design Is Igniting Innovation Again


A funny thing happened on the way to the future. The futurologists were proven wrong. They said for years that the electronics industry was “consolidating,” and they sketched visions of a future that involved less innovation and openness, with fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs to deliver on their dreams. Reality turned out to be different. Yes, consolidation continues among tradit... » read more

Is The IP Industry Healthy?


The semiconductor industry has been through many changes, each designed to reduce the total cost associated with the design and manufacture of chips. Twenty years ago, most companies had their own fabs and designed all of the circuitry on each chip. Today, only a handful of companies still own a fab and outsourcing design, in the form of intellectual property ([getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"]), has... » read more

The Basics Of Foundation IP For Automotive ICs


This white paper provides a broad overview of requirements that must be considered in order to design and manufacture integrated circuits (ICs) for the automotive sector. The paper looks specifically at the standards that apply to Foundation IP - logic libraries, embedded memories, and memory built-in self-test (BIST) - for different automotive IC functions and how reliability grades affect IP ... » read more

Re-Using IP In Packaging


For the past decade, the promise held forth by advanced packaging was that it would allow chipmakers to mix and match analog and digital IP without worrying about the process node at which they were developed or the physical interactions between components. This is a big deal when it comes to analog. Analog IP doesn't benefit from node shrinking the way digital logic does, and in many cases ... » read more

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