Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Accellera formed the Universal Verification Methodology Analog/Mixed-Signal Working Group (UVM-AMS WG), which will work to develop a standard that will provide a unified analog/mixed-signal verification methodology based on UVM to improve the verification of AMS integrated circuits and systems. “Our objective is to standardize a method to drive and monitor analog/mixed-signal nets within UVM,... » read more

Week In Review: IoT, Security, Automotive


Automotive Porsche’s electric race car, the 99X Electric, used ANSYS Technology’s system-level simulation solutions to create an advanced electric powertrain. The powertrain is also being adapted for use in Porsche’s consumer electric cars. "ANSYS system-level simulations are instrumental for optimizing the Porsche E-Performance Powertrain's motor, gearbox, power electronics and control ... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 20


Arm's Ben Fletcher points to research into a new low-cost alternative to through-silicon vias in 3D stacked ICs, particularly cost-sensitive IoT designs, where communication between silicon layers is completely wireless. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks in on the progress of DARPA's OpenROAD project to build a no-human-in-the-loop open source EDA flow for leading-edge nodes. Mentor's Colin ... » read more

Why Standard Memory Choices Are So Confusing


System architects increasingly are developing custom memory architectures based upon specific use cases, adding to the complexity of the design process even though the basic memory building blocks have been around for more than half a century. The number of tradeoffs has skyrocketed along with the volume of data. Memory bandwidth is now a gating factor for applications, and traditional memor... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A eSilicon will be acquired by Inphi Corporation and Synopsys. Inphi is acquiring the majority of the company, including the ASIC business and 56/112G SerDes design and related IP, for $216 million in both cash and the assumption of debt. Inphi expects to combine its DSP, TiA, Driver and SiPho products with eSilicon’s 2.5D packaging and custom silicon design capabilities for electro-optics... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Automotive


Connectivity, 5G Rambus has revealed a PCI Express 5.0 interface on advanced 7nm finFET process node for heterogenous computing aimed at performance-intensive uses, such as AI, data center, HPC, storage and 400GbE networking. With a PHY and a digital controller core recently acquired Northwest Logic, the interface has 32 GT/s (gigatransfers per second) bandwidth per lane with 128 GB/s bandwidt... » read more

Three Steps To Complete Reset Behavior Verification


By Chris Kwok, Priya Viswanathan, and Ping Yeung Reset architectures are notoriously complex and difficult to verify. Today’s SoCs contain highly complex reset distributions and synchronization circuitry. Often, reset trees can be larger than clock trees and have many of the same potential issues. Verifying that a design can be correctly reset under all modes of operation presents signi... » read more

The Challenge Of Defining Worst Case


Worst case conditions within a chip are impossible to define. But what happens if you missed a corner case that causes chip failure? As the semiconductor market becomes increasingly competitive — startups and systems companies are now competing with established chipmakers — no one can afford to consider theoretical worst cases. Instead, they must intelligently prune the space to make sur... » read more

Speeding Up 3D Design


2.5D and 3D designs have garnered a lot of attention recently, but when should these solutions be considered and what are the dangers associated with them? Each new packaging option trades off one set of constraints and problems for a different set, and in some cases the gains may not be worth it. For other applications, they have no choice. The tooling in place today makes it possible to de... » read more

Power Complexity On The Rise


New chip architectures and custom applications are adding significant challenges to chip design and verification, and the problems are becoming much more complex as low power is added into the mix. Power always has been a consideration in design, but in the past it typically involved different power domains that were either on, off, or in some level of sleep mode. As hardware architectures s... » read more

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