Is The IP Industry Healthy?


The semiconductor industry has been through many changes, each designed to reduce the total cost associated with the design and manufacture of chips. Twenty years ago, most companies had their own fabs and designed all of the circuitry on each chip. Today, only a handful of companies still own a fab and outsourcing design, in the form of intellectual property ([getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"]), has... » read more

Rethinking Car Design


The automotive industry is undergoing sweeping changes in both technology and business, and functional safety increasingly cuts across both of them. Every safety-critical industry has one or more functional safety standards, whether that is manufacturing, avionics or automotive. In automotive, it's a combination of [gettech id="31076" comment="ISO 26262"] and various ASIL levels, which are a... » read more

Machine Learning Meets IC Design


Machine Learning (ML) is one of the hot buzzwords these days, but even though EDA deals with big-data types of issues it has not made much progress incorporating ML techniques into EDA tools. Many EDA problems and solutions are statistical in nature, which would suggest a natural fit. So why is it so slow to adopt machine learning technology, while other technology areas such as vision recog... » read more

Safety Plus Security: Solutions And Methodologies


By Ed Sperling & Brian Bailey As more technology makes its way into safety-critical markets—and as more of those devices are connected to the Internet—security issues are beginning to merge with safety issues. The number of attempted cyberattacks is up on every front, which has big implications for devices used in safety-related applications. There are more viruses, ransomware, an... » read more

RISC-V Pros And Cons


Simpler, faster, lower-power hardware with a free, open, simple instruction set architecture? While it sounds too good to be true, efforts are underway to do just that with RISC-V, the instruction-set architecture (ISA) developed by UC Berkeley engineers and now administered by a foundation. It has been known for some time that with [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] not offering the same... » read more

Boldly Go Where No NoC Has Gone Before


Functional safety, at varying degrees of integrity and with or without the ISO 26262, has become a cornerstone of SoCs in many key market segments, not just automotive. And the industry goal is to achieve these reliability levels without sacrificing any PPA and while continually reducing TTM. Go figure! I know, that’s like saying, make me an omelet without breaking eggs. And egg substitute is... » read more

Moore’s Law: Toward SW-Defined Hardware


Pushing to the next process node will continue to be a primary driver for some chips—CPUs, FPGAs and some ASICS—but for many applications that approach is becoming less relevant as a metric for progress. Behind this change is a transition from using customized software with generic hardware, to a mix of specialized, heterogeneous hardware that can achieve better performance with less ene... » read more

What’s Next In Neural Networking?


Faster chips, more affordable storage, and open libraries are giving neural network new momentum, and companies are now in the process of figuring out how to optimize it across a variety of markets. The roots of neural networking stretch back to the late 1940s with Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, but until several years ago this technology made relatively slow progress. The rush towar... » read more

Design Complexity Drives New Automation


As design complexity grows, so does the need for every piece in the design flow—hardware, software, IP, as well as the ecosystem — to be tied together more closely. At one level, design flow capacity is simply getting bigger to accommodate massive [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFET"]-class designs. But beyond sheer size, there are new interactions in the design flow that place much more emp... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Name Changes Arteris changed its name to ArterisIP. The company said the name change better reflects what the company does, which is provide IP for SoC communication on-die and between die. Mentor Graphics also modified its name, following last week's announcement that the acquisition by Siemens has been completed. The company is now officially called Mentor, A Siemens Business. It also ... » read more

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