Preparing For Test Early In The Design Flow


Until very recently, semiconductor design, verification, and test were separate domains. Those domains have since begun to merge, driven by rising demand for reliability, shorter market windows, and increasingly complex chip architectures. In the past, products were designed from a functional perspective, and designers were not concerned about what the physical implementation of the product ... » read more

Design Challenges Increasing For Mixed-Die Packages


The entire semiconductor ecosystem is starting to tackle a long list of technology and business changes that will be needed to continue scaling beyond Moore's Law, making heterogeneous combinations of die easier, cheaper, and more predictable. There are a number of benefits to mixing die and putting them together in a modular way. From a design standpoint, this approach provides access to th... » read more

The Risk Of Losing Track Of Your IP


What happens when you misuse IP, intentionally or otherwise? Pedro Pires, applications engineer at Cliosoft, talks about the challenges of keeping track of IP across multiple chip design projects, which can grow to include dozens of third-party IP blocks, last for long periods of years, and span multiple continents. » read more

Quantifiable Assurance: From IPs to Platforms


Abstract: "Hardware vulnerabilities are generally considered more difficult to fix than software ones because of their persistent nature after fabrication. Thus, it is crucial to assess the security and fix the potential vulnerabilities in the earlier design phases, such as Register Transfer Level (RTL), gate-level or physical layout. The focus of the existing security assessment techniques i... » read more

Challenges With Stacking Memory On Logic


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

Flexible USB4-Based Interface IP Solution For AI At The Edge


Consumers have become accustomed to smart devices that are powered by advances in artificial intelligence (AI). To expand the devices’ total addressable market, innovative device designers build edge AI accelerators and edge AI SoCs that support multiple use cases and integration options. This white paper describes a flexible USB4-based IP solution for edge AI accelerators and SoCs. The IP so... » read more

Why It’s So Difficult — And Costly — To Secure Chips


Rising concerns about the security of chips used in everything from cars to data centers are driving up the cost and complexity of electronic systems in a variety of ways, some obvious and others less so. Until very recently, semiconductor security was viewed more as a theoretical threat than a real one. Governments certainly worried about adversaries taking control of secure systems through... » read more

Three Key Aspects Of IP Quality


It’s no secret that today’s huge system-on-chip (SoC) projects require massive amounts of design reuse. No team, no matter how talented, can design a billion or more gates from scratch. They use extensive borrowing of RTL code from previous and related projects, plus hundreds of thousands of instantiated IP blocks from internal libraries, open-source repositories, development partners, and ... » read more

Effectively Addressing The Challenge Of Securing Connected And Autonomous Vehicles


Vehicles are becoming the most sophisticated connected objects in the ‘Internet of Things’. As vehicles integrate functionality that will enable a fully autonomous future, the attack surface grows substantially. Combined with remote connectivity at multiple points, the clock is ticking in a race to improve cybersecurity in all types of vehicles to ensure that all stakeholders, but particula... » read more

Chip Design Teams And Restaurant Kitchen Staff Have A Lot In Common


By Anagha Pandharpurkar Believe it or not, electronic device and systems-design teams have a lot in common with kitchen staff in big commercial restaurants: They both leverage many different tools and resources to churn out great products in a high-pressure environment to a demanding audience that wants it now, not tomorrow. Unfortunately, design teams are often not nearly as well equippe... » read more

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