IP Risk Sharing


For most people within the semiconductor industry, managing risk involves making the right product decisions that will enable a company to be profitable, and ensuring the product is successfully produced within the necessary time window. In contrast, for products within high-risk areas such as medical and mil/aero, design often proceeds at a slower pace, using proven technologies and adopting l... » read more

Verification Facing Unique Inflection Point


The Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) attracted more than 1,100 people to San Jose last week, just slightly less than last year. While a lot of focus, and most of the glory, goes to design within semiconductor companies, it is verification where most of the advancements are happening and thus the bigger focus for DVCon. The rate of change in verification and the producti... » read more

The Price Of Fear


Fear sells, and judging from the attendance numbers and the messages coming out of this week's RSA Conference, it's selling quite well. Increasing connectedness comes at a significant price, and apparently lots of people are willing to pay that price. Security has become a huge and growing business. Attendance is one indicator. There were an estimated 40,000 attendees at this year's conferen... » read more

Back Doors Are Everywhere


By Ernest Worthman & Ed Sperling Back doors have been a part of chip design since the beginning. One of the first open references was in the 1983 movie "War Games," which features a young computer whiz who uses one to hack into a computer that controls the United States' nuclear arsenal. In reality, modern back doors predate Hollywood's discovery by about 20 years, starting in 1965 wi... » read more

IP Requirements Changing


Twenty years ago the electronics industry became interested in the notion of formalizing re-use through third-party IP. It has turned out to be harder than anyone imagined. In 1996, the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance ([getentity id="22845" comment="VSIA"]) was formed to standardize the development, distribution and licensing of IP. Soon afterward, companies with a couple of people in a ga... » read more

An Architecture Synthesis Platform For Rapidly Evolving SoC Designs


Modern System-on-Chip (SoC) architects are faced with a number of serious challenges. First, the number of Semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) blocks in SoC designs is growing continuously and increasing design complexity. With IP design reuse becoming more common, the mixing and matching of IP components is further compounding design complexity. Second, sophisticated SoC applications are ... » read more

The Big Shift


The number of chipmakers that truly can differentiate their products by moving to the next process node is falling, and that pool will continue to shrink even further over the next few years. Processor companies such as Intel and IBM always will benefit from scaling and architectural changes. So will GPU companies such as Nvidia, and FPGA vendors such as Xilinx, Microsemi and Altera (now par... » read more

Debug Becomes A Bigger Problem


The EDA industry has invested enormous amounts of time and energy on the verification process, including new languages, new tools, new class libraries, new methodologies. But the one part of the cycle that defines that type of automation is debug. Development teams are spending half of their time in the debug process and the problem is growing. Part of the reason is that design and debug are... » read more

Powerful New Standard


In December the IEEE released the latest version of the 1801 specification, entitled the IEEE standard for design and verification of low-power integrated circuits. Most people know it as UPF, or the Unified Power Format. That was the name the first version of it held while being developed within Accellera. The standard provides a way to specify the power intent associated with a design, enabli... » read more

Predictions For 2016: Tools and Flows


Seventeen companies sent in their predictions for this year with some of them sending predictions from several people. This is in addition to the CEO predictions that were recently published. That is a fine crop of views for the coming year, especially since they know that they will be held accountable for their views and this year, just like the last, they will have to answer for them. We beli... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →