Chip Industry Week In Review


The University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE) was awarded $840 million to establish a Department of Defense microelectronics manufacturing center. This center will focus on developing advanced semiconductor microsystems to enhance U.S. defense systems. The project is part of DARPA's NGMM Program. The U.S. Dept. of Commerce announced preliminary terms with Global... » read more

Blog Review: July 17


Cadence's Xin Mu explains the PCIe ECN Unordered IO (UIO) feature in the PCIe 6.1 specification, which defines a new wire semantic and related capabilities to enable multiple-path fabric support and helps avoid unnecessary traffic for better bandwidth and latency. Synopsys' Dana Neustadter, Gary Ruggles, and Richard Solomon highlight the latest updates in the CXL 3.1 standard, including new ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The U.S. Department of Commerce issued a notice of intent  to fund new R&D activities to establish and accelerate domestic advanced packaging capacity. CHIPS for America expects to award up to $1.6 billion in funding innovation across five R&D areas, as outlined in the vision for the National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program (NAPMP), with about $150 million per award in each... » read more

Blog Review: July 10


Cadence's Paul Graykowski suggests using real number modeling to streamline digital mixed-signal verification using logic simulators and hardware emulators. Siemens' John McMillan and Microsoft's Amit Kumar introduce the basics of 3D-IC, describe the flow and data management challenges, look at the evolution of TSMC 3DBlox 1.0 and 2.0, and detail a physical verification and reliability analy... » read more

Securing Data In Heterogeneous Designs


Data security is becoming a bigger concern as chips are disaggregated into chiplets and various third-party IP blocks. There is no single solution that works for all designs, and no single tool or methodology that addresses everything in any design. Data is being transmitted across time zones, political borders, and even across multiple designs. Laws and the need to comply with standards may... » read more

Verification Tools Straining To Keep Up


Verification engineers are the unsung heroes of the semiconductor industry, but they are at a breaking point and desperately in need of modern tools and flows to deal with the rapidly increasing pressures. Verification is no longer just about ensuring that functionality is faithfully represented in an implementation. That alone is an insolvable task, but verification has taken on many new re... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The Design Automation Conference morphed into the Chips to Systems Conference, reflecting an industry shift from monolithic SoCs to assemblies of chiplets in various flavors of advanced packaging. The change drew a slew of students and a resurgent buzz, fueled by discussions about heterogeneous integration, reliability, and ways to leverage AI/ML to speed up design and verification processes. ... » read more

Digital Twins Gaining Traction In Complex Designs


The integration of heterogeneous chiplets into an advanced package, coupled with the increasing digitalization of multiple industry segments, is pushing digital twins to the forefront of design. The challenge in these complex assemblies is figuring out the potential tradeoffs between different chiplets, different assembly approaches, and to be able to do it quickly enough to still hit market... » read more

The Fundamentals Of Software Testing


Recently, I had a conversation with Paul Gerrard, the internationally renowned, award-winning software engineering consultant, author, and coach. We discussed the fact that testing is at the heart of software development. Obviously, as testers, we spend all day testing and thinking about testing. But developers test every line of code they write. Sometimes, users test. In fact, the all-perva... » read more

Data Coherence Across Silos And Hierarchy


Shift left has become a rallying cry for the chip design industry, but unless coherent data can flow between the groups being impacted, the value may not be as great as expected. Shift left is a term that encompasses attempts to bring analysis and decision-making forward in the development process. The earlier an issue can be found, the less of a problem it ultimately becomes. But in many ca... » read more

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