Chip Industry Week In Review


JEDEC and the Open Compute Project rolled out a new set of guidelines for standardizing chiplet characterization details, such as thermal properties, physical and mechanical requirements, and behavior specs. Those details have been a sticking point for commercial chiplets, because without them it's not possible to choose the best chiplet for a particular application or workload. The guidelines ... » read more

Leveraging Symbolic Simulations For IO Verification


IO libraries and interface IPs are an important part of any integrated circuit design that needs to communicate with the outside world or other integrated circuits. Interface IPs are the literal gatekeepers to the flow of logical and electrical information from one IC to another to form today’s complex computer systems, influencing almost every aspect of our lives these days. Interface IPs (e... » read more

Building A Safety Verification Flow


Sal Alvarez, senior manager of application engineering at Synopsys, explains how safety verification differs from functional verification, what changes with failure mode effects analysis, and how to determine and verify the effectiveness of safety features. » read more

Signoff-Compatible CDC


Tanveer Singh, senior staff consulting applications engineer at Synopsys, explains why netlist clock domain crossing is now an essential complement to RTL CDC, why CDC issues are worse at advanced nodes and in AI chips, and why dealing with CDC effectively is becoming a competitive requirement for performance and low power. » read more

Connecting Wafer-Level Parasitic Extraction And Netlisting


The semiconductor technology simulation world is typically divided into device-level TCAD (technology CAD) and circuit-level compact modeling. Larger EDA companies provide high-level design simulation tools that perform LVS (layout vs. schematic), DRC (design rule checking), and many other software solutions that facilitate the entire design process at the most advanced technology nodes. In thi... » read more

Data Centers Turn To New Memories


DRAM extensions and alternatives are starting to show up inside of data centers as the volume of data being processed, stored and accessed continues to skyrocket. This is having a big impact on the architecture of data centers, where the goal now is to move processing much closer to the data and to reduce latency everywhere. Memory has always been a key piece of the Von Neumann compute archi... » read more

Device Pin-Specific Property Extraction For Layout Simulation


As we work through the sub-20 nm design space, the interactions between and effects on devices that are near each other are becoming critical factors in achieving the desired electrical performance. Accurate extraction of device pin-specific properties for modelling these effects is essential to attaining design goals. LVS extraction challenges Layout vs. schematic (LVS) comparison tools prov... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Is Moore’s Law alive or dead? That’s still a topic for debate. In any case, chipmakers continue to move to advanced nodes, but the transitions are taking longer. Even mighty Intel is struggling, based on what the company said about its 14nm finFET process during an investors meeting this week. In fact, Intel continues to struggle with its yields. “14nm yield is maturing; 14nm is still not... » read more