EDA Grabs Bigger Slice Of Chip Market


EDA revenues have been a fairly constant percentage of semiconductor revenues, but that may change in 2019. With new customers creating demand, and some traditional customers shifting focus from advanced nodes, the various branches of the EDA tool industry may be where sticky technical problems are solved. IC manufacturing, packaging and development tools all are finding new ways to handle t... » read more

Efficient Hierarchical Verification For Low Power Designs


By Susantha Wijesekara and Himanshu Bhatt Growing design sizes, low power (LP) complexity and the need for early stage verification is making designers adopt hierarchical verification flows. Traditionally for hierarchical verification, designers use a black box, liberty model based hierarchical flow, timing model (ETM) flow or stub/glass box flows that offer various degrees of trade-offs for... » read more

Efficient Low Power Verification & Debug Methodology Using Power-Aware Simulation


By Himanshu Bhatt and Shreedhar Ramachandra Isolation, retention, and power switches are some of the important functionalities of power-aware designs that use some of the common low power techniques (e.g.) power shutoff, multi-voltage and advanced techniques (e.g.) DVFS, Low VDD standby, and biasing. The strategies for isolation, retention, and level shifter are specified in the power forma... » read more

Impacts Of Reliability On Power And Performance


Making sure a complex system performs as planned, and providing proper access to memories, requires a series of delicate tradeoffs that often were ignored in the past. But with performance improvements increasingly tied to architectures and microarchitectures, rather than just scaling to the next node, approaches such as determinism and different kinds of caching increasingly are becoming criti... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP UltraSoC debuted functional safety-focused Lockstep Monitor, a set of configurable IP blocks that are protocol aware and can be used to cross-check outputs, bus transactions, code execution, and register states between two or more redundant systems. It supports all common lockstep / redundancy architectures, including full dual-redundant lockstep, split/lock, master/checker, and... » read more

Die-to-Die Interconnects for Chip Disaggregation


Today, data growth is at an unprecedented pace. We’re now looking at petabytes of data moving into zettabytes. What that translates to is the need for considerably more compute power and much more bandwidth to process all that data. In networking, high-speed SerDes PHYs represent the linchpin for blazing fast back and forth transmission of data in data centers. In turn, demand is increa... » read more

Low Power Coverage: The Missing Piece In Dynamic Simulation


Through real design examples and case studies, this paper demonstrates how to achieve comprehensive low power design verification closure with all possible sources of power states, their transition coverage, and cross-coverage of power domains of interdependent states. As well the paper proposes a mechanism to combine and represent LP and non-LP coverage in a unified and adaptable database with... » read more

3 Big Challenges For 5G


The general assumption is that we will all be walking around with 5G phones in our pockets someday, but 5G devices may look more like a home router, a car, or maybe even a tablet than a smart phone. There are three main problems that need to be solved here. The big one is coverage, and that gets confusing because it depends on which version of 5G people are talking about. There are at least ... » read more

AI Architectures Must Change


Using existing architectures for solving machine learning and artificial intelligence problems is becoming impractical. The total energy consumed by AI is rising significantly, and CPUs and GPUs increasingly are looking like the wrong tools for the job. Several roundtables have concluded the best opportunity for significant change happens when there is no legacy IP. Most designs have evolved... » read more

In-Design Power Rail Analysis


Tech Talk: Kenneth Chang, senior staff product marketing manager at Synopsys, talks about what can go wrong with power at advanced nodes and why in-design power rail analysis works best early in the flow in helping to reduce overall margin. https://youtu.be/0oiWQPS1-Xk » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →