The Week In Review: Oct. 11


By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling Demand is running high for DRAMs, thanks to last month’s fab fire at Hynix’ China plant. “The impact from Hynix' fab fire seems to be far more extensive than we had originally thought. We now think the factory is most likely up at the earliest by May/June 2014, which certainly provides robust pricing support for DRAM. Hynix is in the process of convertin... » read more

Experts At The Table: Who Takes Responsibility?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with John Koeter, vice president of marketing and AEs for IP and systems at Synopsys; Mike Stellfox, technical leader of the verification solutions architecture team at Cadence; Laurent Moll, CTO at Arteris; Gino Skulick, vice president and general manager of the SDMS business unit at eSilicon; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of corporate marketing at Atrenta; ... » read more

Low Power Verification – “X” Marks the Spot


Welcome to a new discussion on a range of topics we think will be interesting to folks who design and verify SoCs. Though the name of this blog denotes two top attributes of SoCs—IP implementation and the pervasive need for low power (LP), we certainly may go far beyond the scope of these topics in upcoming posts. We’ll start with a topic on the LP side, and going forward we’ll alternate ... » read more

The Integrated IP Subsystem: A Converging SoC Solution


The consumer device market is witnessing incredible market space convergence between mobile handheld, automotive, and home electronics. IP vendors, engineers, and system design engineers face a multitude of challenges when designing and developing ICs, systems, or subsystems for the next great portable device. The next cell phone for instance, will not only be a multimedia player, but also a de... » read more

Flexibility Improves Memory Interface Bandwidth


In today’s SoCs, memory is the heart or at least one of the main elements of the design. As such, designing them carefully is paramount to achieving the best bandwidth, performance and power. Performance is very important to be able to access the memory and to trade and store information from different IPs with shared memories or local memories. From the power perspective, every access to... » read more

Experts At The Table: Who Takes Responsibility?


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Engineering sat down with John Koeter, vice president of marketing and AEs for IP and systems at Synopsys; Mike Stellfox, technical leader of the verification solutions architecture team at Cadence; Laurent Moll, CTO at Arteris; Gino Skulick, vice president and general manager of the SDMS business unit at eSilicon; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of corporate market... » read more

IP-XACT Becoming More Useful


Accellera created analog/mixed signal extensions to the IEEE IP-XACT standard, and the standards group will recommend an update to the overall standard later this year to make it more useful for IP integration. IP-XACT has been considered a great idea since its introduction in 2009 because it allows IP makers to add metadata to their IP—information needed to integrate it into complex desig... » read more

Buying And Selling EDA Companies


By Ed Sperling Buying companies is the easy part. Integrating them is the hard part. It’s also the point where most acquisitions that go awry actually run into problems. There are widely different strategies for how to accomplish integration. Sometimes they work, other times they don’t. And sometimes both companies are surprised by the outcome—for better or worse. “Either you thi... » read more

Experts At The Table: Debug


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Galen Blake, senior verification engineer at Altera; Warren Stapleton, senior fellow at Advanced Micro Devices; Stephen Bailey, director of solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Michael Sanie, senior director of verification marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the big issues with debug? ... » read more

More Test Needed For Integrated IP


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As the use and reuse of design IPs and cores has reached approximately 70% of the content of an SoC, the need for both pre- and post-silicon test has increased. On the pre-silicon side, test comes in the form of verification IP. Driving the addition of more strenuous test approaches on this side is a combination of forces that impact design, noted Tom Hackett, prod... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →