Focus Shifting To Photonics


Silicon photonics finally appears ready for prime time, after years of unfulfilled expectations and a vision that stretches back at least a couple decades. The biggest challenge has been the ability to build a light source directly into the silicon process, rather than trying to add one onto a chip after manufacturing. [getentity id="22846" e_name="Intel"] today said it has achieved that mi... » read more

Optimization Challenges For 10nm And 7nm


Optimization used to be a simple timing against area tradeoff but not anymore. As we go to each new node, the tradeoffs become more complicated involving additional aspects of the design that used to be dealt with in isolation. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Krishna Balachandran, director of product management for low power products at [getentity id="22032" ... » read more

LVS Boxing Helps Designers Knock Out Designs Quickly


Keeping up with the constant demand for better, faster design flow performance while preserving the original layout hierarchy of a design can be very challenging during design verification. Designers must constantly manage tradeoffs between performance, database size, and accuracy. In the early design cycle, using the LVS boxing capabilities of Calibre nmLVS to replace incomplete or missing blo... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 17


Mentor's Andrew Macleod listens in on the most pressing electrical engineering and embedded software challenges in the automotive industry today, in an IESF presentation by Paul Johnston. Many flash memory protocols have appeared, and Synopsys' Rahul Ramesh Chaudhari delves into ONFi in particular. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into the challenges facing the development and roll out of 5G.... » read more

New Architectures, Approaches To Speed Up Chips


The need for speed is back. An explosion in the amount of data that needs to be collected and processed is driving a new wave of change in hardware, software and overall system design. After years of emphasizing power reduction, performance has re-emerged as a top concern in a variety of applications such as smarter cars, wearable devices and cloud data centers. But how to get there has cha... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


IP Avery Design Systems released NVM Express over Fabrics 1.0 and NVM Express 1.2.1 extensions to its NVM-Xactor verification IP, enabling verification of both NVMe over PCIe and NVMe over Fabrics designs. Arastu Systems uncorked an optimized DDR3/4 DRAM Controller Core, which works with DFI 3.1 compatible PHY. The core supports all key DDR3/DDR4 features and additional features like Erro... » read more

Designing SoC Power Networks


Designing a power network for a complex SoC is becoming critical for the success of the product, but most chips are still using old techniques that are ill-suited to the latest fabrication technologies, resulting in an expensive, overdesigned product. Not only is the power network as designed too large, but this has several knock-on effects that impact area, timing and power. In the first pa... » read more

Does Power Analysis Need To Be Accurate?


The mere mention of accuracy in power analysis and optimization today can trigger a contentious discussion, even among typically reserved engineers. What is needed and where? Which tools are truly as accurate as claimed? And how much accuracy is actually needed for power analysis, [getkc id="112" kc_name="estimation"], and optimization? First of all, the accuracy required really depends o... » read more

Optimization Challenges For 10nm And 7nm


Optimization used to be a simple timing against area tradeoff, but not anymore. As we go to each new node the tradeoffs become more complicated, involving additional aspects of the design that used to be dealt with in isolation. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these issues with Krishna Balachandran, director of product management for low-power products at [getentity id="22032"... » read more

Reaching The Power Budget


Everything related to power in chip design today is a big deal—and it’s just getting bigger. Meeting the power budget is becoming harder at each new node, but it's also becoming difficult in a number of new application areas at existing nodes. That's a big problem because [getkc id="108" kc_name="power"] is now considered a competitive advantage in many markets. It's also one of the most... » read more

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