DRAM Choices Becoming Central Design Considerations


Chipmakers are paying much closer attention to various DRAM options as they grapple with what goes on-chip or into a package, elevating attached memory to a critical design element that can affect system performance, power, and cost. These are increasingly important issues to sort through with a number of tradeoffs, but the general consensus is that to reach the higher levels of performance ... » read more

The Challenge Of Optimizing Chip Architectures For Workloads


It isn't possible to optimize a workload running on a system just by looking at hardware or software separately. They need to be developed together and intricately intertwined, an engineering feat that also requires bridging two worlds with have a long history of operating independently. In the early days of computing, hardware and software were designed and built by completely separate team... » read more

Improving PPA With AI


AI/ML/DL is starting to show up in EDA tools for a variety of steps in the semiconductor design flow, many of them aimed at improving performance, reducing power, and speeding time to market by catching errors that humans might overlook. It's unlikely that complex SoCs, or heterogeneous integration in advanced packages, ever will be perfect at first silicon. Still, the number of common error... » read more

What’s In A Name(space)? Optimizing SSD Controller Performance And Verification


Solid state drives (SSDs) have come to the forefront as a promising solution for today and tomorrow’s immense data transfer and storage demands. And SSDs themselves are constantly evolving with upgrades of their critical components to provide higher access speeds. One such component for the NVMe specification is created by the division of non-volatile memory (NVM) into what are commonly known... » read more

Software-Defined Cars


Automotive architectures are becoming increasingly software-driven, a shift that simplifies upgrades and makes it easier to add new features into vehicles. All of this is enabled by the increasing digitalization of automotive functions and features, shifting from mechanical to electrical design, and increasingly from analog to digital data. That enables OEMs to add or up-sell features years ... » read more

NVMe-oF: Simple, Invisible Fabric For Distributed Storage Networks


In today’s fast paced world, we need seamless access to huge chunks of data and new-world technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud computing, and real-time data analytics. AI researchers are deriving applications such as cyber security analysis and intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) where the computer needs to process an intense amount of data. Theref... » read more

Blog Review: May 11


Ansys' Vidyu Challa checks out how to identify the most important battery metrics for a particular application and trade these off against others with a focus on the important considerations when selecting the right battery for a consumer application, such as rechargeability, energy density, power density, shelf life, safety, form factor, cost, and flexibility. Cadence's Shyam Sharma points ... » read more

Hidden Impacts Of Software Updates


Over-the-air updates can reduce obsolescence over longer chip and system lifetimes, but those updates also can impact reliability, performance, and affect how various resources such as memory and various processing elements are used. The connected world is very familiar with over-the-air (OTA) updates in smart phones and computers, where the software stack — firmware, operating systems, dr... » read more

Where And When End-to-End Analytics Works


With data exploding across all manufacturing steps, the promise of leveraging it from fab to field is beginning to pay off. Engineers are beginning to connect device data across manufacturing and test steps, making it possible to more easily achieve yield and quality goals at lower cost. The key is knowing which process knob will increase yield, which failures can be detected earlier, and wh... » read more

Automotive Safety Island


The promise of autonomous vehicles is driving profound changes in the design and testing of automotive semiconductor parts. Automotive ICs, once deployed for simple functions like controlling windows, are now performing complex functions related to advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving applications. The processing power required results in very large and complex ICs that ... » read more

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