Blog Review: Dec. 12


Mentor's Harry Foster checks out how much time and effort is spent on verification of FPGAs and points to the increasing demand for verification engineers. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into IC Insights' year-end report to see how some of the top semiconductor companies stack up. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that air gaps, a valuable barrier against cyberattacks, are disappearing from ... » read more

Where Advanced Packaging Makes Sense


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Chenglin Liu, director of package engineering at Marvell; John Hunt, senior director of engineering at ASE; Eric Tosaya, senior director of package manufacturing at eSilicon; and Juan Rey, vice president of engineering for Calibre at Mentor, a Siemens Business. What follows are excerpts of that discussion, which was held in front of a live audience at MEP... » read more

Will Cowboys Or Collaborators Shape The Self-Driving Future?


You may have noticed the bloom is ever so slightly off the autonomous vehicle rose. This is likely due to some combination of a generalized malaise and growing cynicism directed at Silicon Valley in general (where of course much work on AVs continues apace) and a growing list of highly publicized self-driving incidents that surely make PR teams groan. Exhibit A from this week was the California... » read more

Autonomous Vehicle Design Begins To Change Direction


Tools that are commonly used in semiconductor design are starting to be applied at the system level for assisted and autonomous vehicles, setting the stage for more complex simulated scenarios and electronic system design. Simulation is well understood for designing automotive ICs, but now it also is being used to design vehicle architectures and sensors, as well as for sensor miniaturizatio... » read more

Collaborative IC Design Mandates Integrated Data Management


Due to complexity and multi-domain expertise, custom IC design typically requires a team to successfully design and verify the project. Often, specific blocks are assigned to team members based on analog, digital, MEMS, RF expertise, across multiple geographies, and separate verification team members focus on block and system validation. This means that unstructured design files with multiple c... » read more

Mitigating Risk Through Verification


Verification is all about mitigating risk, and one of the growing issues alongside of increasing complexity and new architectures is coverage. The whole notion of coverage is making sure a chip will work as designed. That requires determining the effectiveness of the simulation tests that stimulate it, and its effectiveness in terms of activating structures of functional behavior and design.... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 5


Mentor's Harry Foster digs into verification effectiveness in FPGA projects and what it means that so many non-trivial bugs escape into production. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out an effort to integrate photonics with CMOS and find the tradeoffs in three different approaches, plus the view of photonics as applied to military aircraft. Synopsys' Richard Solomon shares some highlights on... » read more

Making Sure A Heterogeneous Design Will Work


An explosion of various types of processors and localized memories on a chip or in a package is making it much more difficult to verify and test these devices, and to sign off with confidence. In addition to timing and clock domain crossing issues, which are becoming much more difficult to deal with in complex chips, some of the new devices are including AI, machine learning or deep learning... » read more

Looking Beyond The CPU


CPUs no longer deliver the same kind of of performance improvements as in the past, raising questions across the industry about what comes next. The growth in processing power delivered by a single CPU core began stalling out at the beginning of the decade, when power-related issues such as heat and noise forced processor companies to add more cores rather than pushing up the clock frequency... » read more

Bare Metal Programming


As the need for safety and security grows across application areas such as automotive, industrial, and in the cloud, the semiconductor industry is searching for the best ways to protect these systems. The big question is whether it is better to build security and safety into hardware, into software, or both. The answer isn't entirely clear yet, but one of the options under consideration is s... » read more

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