Similar But Different — The Tale Of Transient And Permanent Faults


When determining whether an IC is safe from random hardware faults, applying safety metrics such as PMHF, SPFM, and LFM, engineers must analyze both transient and permanent faults. This paper highlights the fundamental differences between permanent and transient faults on digital circuits, and why this distinction is important in the context of the ISO 26262:2018 functional safety standard. ... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 5


Arm's Andrew Pickard chats with Georgia Tech's Azad Naeemi and Da Eun Shim about an effort to evaluate the benefit of new interconnect materials and wire geometry and determine their impacts at the microprocessor level. Synopsys' Shekhar Kapoor shares highlights from a recent panel exploring the promises, challenges, and realities of 3D IC technology, including the potential of 3D nanosystem... » read more

IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Highlights from ITC The hot topic at this week’s International Test Conference (ITC) was tackling silent data corruption, with panel discussions, papers, and Google’s Parthasarathy Ranganathan’s keynote address all emphasizing the urgency of the issue. In the past two years Meta, Google, and Microsoft have reported on silent errors, errors not detected at test, which are adversely impact... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools and IP Renesas introduced a new microprocessor that enables artificial intelligence to process image data from multiple cameras. "One of the challenges for embedded systems developers who want to implement machine learning is to keep up with the latest AI models that are constantly evolving,” said Shigeki Kato, Vice President of Renesas' Enterprise Infrastructure Business Division. �... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Renesas announced its integrated development environment (IDE), which car companies can use to develop automotive software for electronic control units (ECUs) with multiple devices, but for which the hardware has not been specified yet. The IDE has co-simulation, debug and trace, high-speed simulation and distributed processing software over multiple SoCs and MCUs. The first develop... » read more

Verification Methodologies Evolve, But Slowly


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss digital twins and what is required to develop and verify new chips across a variety of industries, such as automotive and aerospace, with Larry Lapides, vice president of sales for Imperas Software; Mike Thompson, director of engineering for the verification task group at OpenHW; Paul Graykowski, technical marketing manager for Arteris IP; Shantanu ... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 28


Cadence's Paul McLellan shares more highlights from the recent Hot Chips, including some very large chips and accelerators for AI and deep learning, new networks and switches, and mobile and edge processors. Synopsys' Marc Serughetti considers the different use cases for digital twins in automotive and how they can help determine the impact of software on verification, test, and validation a... » read more

Toward Domain-Specific EDA


More companies appear to be creating custom EDA tools, but it is not clear if this trend is accelerating and what it means for the mainstream EDA industry. Whenever there is change, there is opportunity. Change can come from new abstractions, new options for optimization, or new limitations that are imposed on a tool or flow. For example, the slowing of Moore's Law means that sufficient prog... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


On Sunday, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the southeast region of Taiwan, causing devastation. TSMC officials reported “no known significant impact for now.” Market research firm TrendForce arrived at a similar conclusion based on its analysis of individual fabs. The Biden administration announced appointment of the leadership team charged with implementing the US CHIPS and Science Ac... » read more

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