How Much AI Is Really Needed?


Tensor Core GPUs have created a generative AI model gold rush. Whether it’s helping students with math homework, planning a vacation, or learning to prepare a six-course meal, generative AI is ready with answers. But that's only one aspect of AI, and not every application requires it. AI — now an all-inclusive term, referring to the process of using algorithms to learn, predict, and make... » read more

Making Sensors More Reliable


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the latest issues in sensors with Prakash Madhvapathy, director of product marketing, Tensilica audio/voice DSPs group at Cadence; Kevin Hughes, senior product manager for MEMS sensors at Infineon; and Matthew Hogan, product management director at Siemens EDA. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. [L-R] Kevin ... » read more

Gearing Up For Level 4 Vehicles


More autonomous features are being added into high-end vehicles, but getting to full autonomy will likely take years more effort, a slew of new technologies — some of which are not in use today, and some of which involve infrastructure outside the vehicle — along with sufficient volume to bring the cost of these combined capabilities down to an affordable price point. In the meantime, ma... » read more

Why Are S-Parameters Superior For Power Module Optimization?


A power module is a high-power switching circuit – used in electric vehicles, renewable energy, photovoltaics, wind, and many more applications – that uses insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBT) or metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors as switching elements. This paper discusses the difference in power module simulation using lumped elements and S-Parameters. Using a simple ... » read more

Blog Review: October 4


Cadence's Felipe Goncalves checks out the Integrity and Data Encryption (IDE) feature in PCIe 6.0, a new layer inserted between the transection layer and data link layer with the goal of protecting against threats from physical attacks on the link. Siemens' Robin Bornoff, Daniel Berger, and Kai Liu explore the potential for large language models (LLMs) make the use of CAE tools simpler, more... » read more

Everyone’s A System Designer With Heterogeneous Integration


The move away from monolithic SoCs to heterogeneous chips and chiplets in a package is accelerating, setting in motion a broad shift in methodologies, collaborations, and design goals that are felt by engineers at every step of the flow, from design through manufacturing. Nearly every engineer is now working or touching some technology, process, or methodology that is new. And they are inter... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Liz Allan, and Gregory Haley. TSMC rolled out the second version of its 3Dblox, which creates an infrastructure for stacking chiplets and other necessary components in a package, along with a standardized way of achieving that. Two novel features are chiplet mirroring for design reuse, and what is basically sandbox for power and thermal analysis of different design elements. ... » read more

Industry Pressure Grows For Simulating Systems Of Systems


Most complex systems are designed in a top-down manner, but as the amount of electronic content in those systems increases, so does the pressure on the chip industry to provide high-level models and simulation capabilities. Those models either do not exist today, or they exist in isolation. No matter how capable a model or simulator, there never will be one that can do it all. In some cases,... » read more

What Happened To Portable Stimulus?


In June 2018, Accellera released the initial version of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS), a new verification language that was slated to be the first new abstraction defined within EDA for a couple of decades. So what happened to it? Apart from a few updates at DVCon, there appears to be little talk about it today. However, the industry has its head down trying to make it work, ... » read more

A Shift Left Strategy Is One Part Of A Holistic Approach To IC Design Verification


The whole is more than the sum of its parts. –Aristotle A machine is nothing more than a collection of nuts, bolts, wheels, gears, wires, pipes, chains, and what have you. And yet, when they are all connected up properly, magic happens. Instead of a pile of parts, you have a car, or a dishwasher, or a nuclear reactor. The connections and interactions between all those parts turns the whole... » read more

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