On The Cusp Of 5G


Carriers and chipmakers are celebrating the rollout of the first standards-compliant commercial 5G services. "We are, officially in the era of 5G," said John Smee, vice president of engineering at Qualcomm at the recent 5G Summit at IEEE's International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in Boston. Movement is happening on the commercial end. Major U.S. carriers Verizon, AT&T and Sprint have set ... » read more

Taking Energy Into Account


Considering power throughout the SoC design flow is common practice. The same cannot be said for energy, although that is beginning to change as chips increasingly incorporate heterogeneous processing elements. Combined with this, AI/ML/DL technologies increasingly allow engineering teams to explore and optimize design data for more targeted and efficient systems. But this approach also requ... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 28


Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at the numerous challenges in designing and manufacturing Cerebras' massive 400,000 processor, 1.2 trillion transistor chip. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding points to a lack of robust mobile app security and why building in security from the beginning can lead to greater productivity and cost saving. Mentor's Paul Johnston takes a look at what's in store at... » read more

EDA Gears Up For 3D


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for the Semiconductor Business Unit of ANSYS; John Park, product management director for IC packaging and cross-platform solutions at Cadence; John Ferguson, director of marketing for DRC applications at Mentor, a Siemens Bus... » read more

Fast LFD Flows With Pattern Matching And Machine Learning Can Deliver Higher-Yielding Designs Faster


By Wael ElManhawy and Joe Kwan A lithographic (litho) hotspot is a defect on a wafer that is created during manufacturing by a combination of systematic process variation and resolution enhancement technology (RET) limitations. Litho hotspots typically represent severe yield detractors, so detecting and eliminating potential litho hotspots prior to manufacturing is crucial to achieving a com... » read more

Synthesizing Hardware From Software


The ability to automatically generate optimized hardware from software was one of the primary tenets of system-level design automation that was never fully achieved. The question now is whether that will ever happen, and whether it is just a matter of having the right technology or motivation to make it possible. While high-level synthesis (HLS) did come out of this work and has proven to be... » read more

Improving Verification Predictability And Efficiency Using Big Data


By providing a Big Data infrastructure, with state of the art technologies, within the verification environment, the combination of all verification metrics allows all resources to be used as efficiently as possible and enables process improvements using predictive analysis. This paper covers the technology, the metrics, and the process, and it will explore a number of techniques enabled by suc... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 21


Cadence's Paul McLellan considers the path to autonomous vehicles and the many barriers that stand in the way. Mentor's Colin Walls notes that the fundamental function of an RTOS is to give the developer control of time and points to some of the time oriented services that assist. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding points to ways the financial services industry could improve cybersecurity, from u... » read more

Siemens-Mentor Deal Retrospective


Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens PLM Software and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the acquisition of Mentor Graphics, the shift toward more customized design, and where AI fits into the design picture. SE: How does a company like Siemens see the EDA industry evolving? Hemmelgarn: Part of the reason we bought Mentor Grap... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 14


Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into Mary Meeker's analysis of Internet trends, from growth of the Inernet as a whole to cyber attacks, online finance, and the gig economy. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that the financial services industry is aware of cybersecurity threats, but isn't doing enough to protect its networks and data. Mentor's Colin Walls considers a few cases where writing in... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →