Improving Verification Predictability And Efficiency Using Big Data


Big data is a term that has been around for decades. It was initially defined as data sets captured, managed, and processed in a tolerable amount of time beyond the ability of normal software tools. The only constant in big data’s size over this time is that it’s been a moving target driven by improvements in parallel processing power and cheaper storage capacity. Today most of the industry... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 8


Cadence's Sanjeet Kumar points to key changes and optimizations that are done for USB3 Gen T compared to USB3 Gen X tunneling in order to minimize tunnel overhead and maximize USB3 throughput. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster considers the effectiveness of IC and ASIC verification by looking at schedule overruns, number of required spins, and classification of functional bugs. Synopsys' Chris C... » read more

Big Changes Ahead For Chip Technology And Industry Dynamics


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of customization and advanced packaging, and concerns about reliability and geopolitical rivalries with Martin van den Brink, president and CTO of ASML; Luc Van den Hove, CEO of imec; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; and Ankur Gupta, vice president and general manager of the test group and lifecycle s... » read more

Hunting For Hardware-Related Errors In Data Centers


The semiconductor industry is urgently pursuing design, monitoring, and testing strategies to help identify and eliminate hardware defects that can cause catastrophic errors. Corrupt execution errors, also known as silent data errors, cannot be fully isolated at test — even with system-level testing — because they occur only under specific conditions. To sort out the environmental condit... » read more

Bump Reliability is Challenged By Latent Defects


Thermal stress is a well-known problem in advanced packaging, along with the challenges of mechanical stress. Both are exacerbated by heterogenous integration, which often requires mingling materials with incompatible coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE). Effects are already showing up and will likely only get worse as package densities increase beyond 1,000 bumps per chip. “You comb... » read more

Ramping Up IC Predictive Maintenance


The chip industry is starting to add technology that can predict impending failures early enough to stave off serious problems, both in manufacturing and in the field. Engineers increasingly are employing in-circuit monitors embedded in SoC designs to catch device failures earlier in the production flow. But for ICs in the field, data tracing from design to application use only recently has ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


The United States Justice of Department asked Tesla for documents relating to its Autopilot driver assistance system and its Full Self-Driving (FSD). Among other tech company woes, some of which are leading to layoffs, Apple sales dropped 5% year over year and it missed its earnings target this quarter. The U.S. state of Kansas will commit $304M to Kansas-based OSAT Integra Technologies t... » read more

Week in Review: Design, Low Power


Intel discontinued its Pathfinder for RISC-V program, according to numerous reports. The program provided a pre-silicon development environment to support IP selection and early-stage software development using Intel FPGA and simulator platforms. "Since Intel will not be providing any additional releases or bug fixes, we encourage you to promptly transition to third-party RISC-V software tools ... » read more

Building Better Cars Faster


Carmakers are accelerating their chip and electronic design schedules to remain competitive in an increasingly fast-changing market, but they are encountering gaps in the tooling, the supply chain, and in the methodologies they use to create those cars. While it's easy to envision how CAD software could be used to create the next new vehicle’s 3-D look, and how simulation software helps de... » read more

A New Era In Requirements Management


Project teams face a host of challenges when developing semiconductors compliant to a safety critical market. ISO 26262 drives state-of-the art safety critical designs for automotive electronics, DO-254 for airborne electronics hardware, and IEC61508 for industrial electronics, to name a few. In the context of ISO 26262, much of the discussion in recent years has been on challenges addressin... » read more

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