Why Your NoC Verification Strategy Must Consider Using Formal


By Ashish Darbari and Bing Xue It’d be inconceivable these days to design a modern high-performance SoC without a network-on-chip (NoC) fabric. AI hyperscalers are inherently multi-threaded and rely on using hundreds of processing elements (PEs). Crossbar-based fabric would just not scale. What also changes with the adoption of the NoC is how to handle coherency between PEs. ACE is no long... » read more

Using SystemC TLM Modeling To Solve AI Data Movement Challenges


In AI silicon, the performance numbers tell only part of the story. Marketing claims often highlight headline metrics such as trillions of operations per second, tensor throughput, matrix dimensions, and accelerator density. But engineers building these systems understand the harder truth. Compute performance matters only when data arrives at the right rate, with the right latency, and without ... » read more

Wafer-Scale vs. Chiplets: The New War? Part 1


Cerebras’ IPO is a meaningful moment for the semiconductor industry — and not just for the financial implications. Their confidence in their opening price reflects something the industry has effectively acknowledged: incremental chip scaling can no longer keep pace with what AI infrastructure demands. Radical approaches are earning serious consideration and serious capital. Cerebras... » read more

Overcoming Bottlenecks In Data Movement


AI is all about data. There is more data to process, store, and move, and more tradeoffs required to do that efficiently and with enough flexibility to handle changes in future workloads. Nandan Nayampally, chief commercial officer at Baya Systems, talks about networks on chip and networks across chip, what the choke points are for data movement, and where and when data coherency makes sense. » read more

Facilitating Complex SoC Design Through Automation And Integration


The design demands of today’s highly advanced system-on-chip (SoC) devices have long outgrown the capabilities of manual workflows to manage them effectively. As these chips become more complex, only sophisticated, high-performance, and scalable automation can ensure that every component of the SoC functions seamlessly. The SoC integration challenge A fundamental aspect of SoC design is the... » read more

NoC Coherency Challenges Balloon With AI SoCs And Chiplets


Key Takeaways Data movement, congestion, and energy efficiency are key determiners of whether compute is usable. Different processors bring various coherency challenges. For example, a cache-coherent NoC for CPUs is expensive and harder to verify than an I/O-coherent NoC for an accelerator. Designers need to balance top-down performance with bottom-up physical engineering to effect... » read more

Data Boom Puts Pressure On NoCs, Fabrics


Key Takeaways: NoC challenges, such as wiring congestion, timing closure, and performance, must be considered in tandem with topology and placement. Topologies can be customized to meet an application’s specific data flow needs, with a system containing multiple topologies to suit different data or zones. What is challenging for one type of system, such as an SoC, switch, or AI chi... » read more

Replay‑based Validation as a Scalable Methodology for Chiplet‑based Systems (Intel, Synopsys)


A new technical paper, "ODIN-Based CPU-GPU Architecture with Replay-Driven Simulation and Emulation," was published by researchers at Intel, Nvidia and Synopsys. Abstract "Integration of CPU and GPU technologies is a key enabler for modern AI and graphics workloads, combining control-oriented processing with massive parallel compute capability. As systems evolve toward chiplet-based archite... » read more

Confidentiality-preserving Framework For Secure On-Chip Communication in NoC Architectures


A new technical paper, "Secure Multi-Path Routing with All-or-Nothing Transform for Network-on-Chip Architectures," was published by researchers at University of Florida. Abstract "Ensuring Network-on-Chip (NoC) security is crucial to design trustworthy NoC-based System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. While there are various threats that exploit on-chip communication vulnerabilities, eavesdrop... » read more

Challenges In Moving Data In Chips


The number of processes running simultaneously inside of chips is growing, fueled by massive increases in data from AI and sensors everywhere. The challenge now, particularly in multi-die assemblies, is how to prioritize where signals go, how quickly they move, and when they're supposed to arrive at shared memories. Andy Nightingale, vice president of product management and marketing at Arteris... » read more

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