tag: Makimoto’s Wave

Will Domain-Specific ICs Become Ubiquitous?
By Brian Bailey - 16 May, 2024 - Comments: 0

Questions are surfacing for all types of design, ranging from small microcontrollers to leading-edge chips, over whether domain-specific design will become ubiquitous, or whether it will fall into the historic pattern of customization first, followed by lower-cost, general-purpose components. Custom hardware always has been a double-edged sword. It can provide a competitive edge for chipmake... » read more

Specialization Vs. Generalization In Processors
By Brian Bailey - 10 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 1

Academia has been looking at specialization for many years, but solutions were rejected because general-purpose solutions were advancing fast enough to keep up with most application requirements. That is no longer the case. The introduction and support of the RISC-V processor architecture has attracted a lot of attention, but whether that is the right direction for the majority of modern comput... » read more

Fabless IDMs Redefine The Leading Edge
By Marie C. Baca - 27 Oct, 2022 - Comments: 0

Large systems companies are looking more like integrated device manufacturers, designing their own advanced chips, packages, and systems for internal use. But because these are not pure-play chip companies, they are disrupting a 10-year cadence of customization and standardization that has defined the chip industry from its inception, and extending the period of innovation without the associate... » read more

Scaling, Advanced Packaging, Or Both
By Ed Sperling - 01 Aug, 2022 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers are facing a growing number of challenges and tradeoffs at the leading edge, where the cost of process shrinks is already exorbitant and rising. While it's theoretically possible to scale digital logic to 10 angstroms (1nm) and below, the likelihood of a planar SoC being developed at that nodes appears increasingly unlikely. This is hardly shocking in an industry that has heard pr... » read more

Bespoke Silicon Redefines Custom ASICs
By Ann Mutschler - 28 Jul, 2022 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss bespoke silicon and what's driving that customization with Kam Kittrell, vice president of product management in the Digital & Signoff group at Cadence; Rupert Baines, chief marketing officer at Codasip; Kevin McDermott, vice president of marketing at Imperas; Mo Faisal, CEO of Movellus; Ankur Gupta, vice president and general manager of Siemens... » read more

Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry
By Ed Sperling - 02 Aug, 2021 - Comments: 2

The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

EDA, IP Revenues Soar
By Ed Sperling - 13 Apr, 2021 - Comments: 1

EDA and IP revenues increased 15.4% to $3.032 billion in Q4 2020, according to a just-released report, with huge increases reported in China and India, and a solid double-digit increase in the Americas. EDA/IP revenue from China increased 66.4% in Q4 EDA/IP compared with the same period in 2019, and for the 2020 calendar year it was up 52.3%. India's spending was up 32% for the quarter. And ... » read more

The Other Side Of Makimoto’s Wave
By Ann Mutschler - 06 Mar, 2019 - Comments: 0

Custom hardware is undergoing a huge resurgence across a variety of new applications, pushing the semiconductor industry to the other side of Makimoto's Wave. Tsugio Makimoto, the technologist who identified the chip industry’s 10-year cyclical swings between standardization and customization, predicted there always will be room in ASICs for general-purpose processors. But it's becoming mo... » read more

A New Era For EDA
By Brian Bailey - 26 Jul, 2018 - Comments: 0

For almost the entirety of my time in EDA, which is approaching 40 years, the total number of design starts has been declining. A lot of this is to be expected. Semiconductors was the new and exciting world where startups popped up hoping to make it big in Silicon Valley, or indeed to become the next Silicon Valley, Forest, Swamp or Desert. Many of them didn't manage to get beyond a neat concep... » read more

Hardware/Software Tipping Point
By Brian Bailey - 08 Jun, 2017 - Comments: 0

It doesn't matter if you believe [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] has ended or is just slowing down. It is becoming very clear that design in the future will be significant different than it is today. Moore's law allowed the semiconductor industry to reuse design blocks from previous designs, and these were helped along by a new technology node—even if it was a sub-optimal solution. I... » read more

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