Cars, Security, And HW-SW Co-Design


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss parallel hardware/software design with Johannes Stahl, director of product marketing, prototyping and FPGA, [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"]; [getperson id="11411" comment="Bill Neifert"], director of models technology, [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"]; Hemant Kumar, director of ASIC design, Nvidia; and Scott Constable, senior member of ... » read more

GPUs Power Ahead


GPUs, long a sideshow for CPUs, are suddenly the rising stars of the processor world. They are a first choice in everything from artificial intelligence systems to automotive ADAS applications and deep learning systems powered by [getkc id="261" kc_name="convolutional neural network"]. And they are still the mainstays of high-performance computing, gaming and scientific computation, to name ... » read more

CPU, GPU, or FPGA?


Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1080 gaming graphics card is a piece of work. Employing the company’s Pascal architecture and featuring chips made with a 16nm [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFET"] process, the GTX 1080’s GP104 graphics processing units boast 7.2 billion transistors, running at 1.6 GHz, and it can be overclocked to 1.733 GHz. The die size is 314 mm², 21% smaller than its GeForce ... » read more

The Secret to Reaching Rapid Verification Closure


Every design team is looking to reduce RTL verification time in order to meet aggressive schedules. Successful teams have moved their level of design abstraction up to the C++ or [gettech id="31018" comment="SystemC"] level and employ [getkc id="105" comment="high-level synthesis"] (HLS) within their design flow. By taking advantage of this high-level description, these teams also plug into int... » read more

DAC Day Three: UVM, Machine Learning And DFT Come Together


The industry and users have a love/hate relationship with UVM. It has quickly risen to become the most used verification methodology and yet at the same time it is seen as being overly complex, unwieldy and difficult to learn. The third day of DAC gets started with breakfast with Accellera to discuss UVM and what we can expect to see in the next 5 years. The discussion was led by Tom Alsop, pri... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers IC Insights released its top chip makers in terms of sales for the first quarter of 2016. The top-20 ranking includes three pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and UMC) and six fabless companies. Intel remained in the top spot, followed in order by Samsung and TSMC. The biggest movers in the ranking were made by the new Broadcom (Avago/Broadcom) and Nvidia. Broadcom jumped f... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Samsung has rolled out the Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator, an appliance that changes the landscape in the refrigerator market. The refrigerator comes with a 21.5-inch LCD touchscreen, which serves as the digital command center and connects to a smartphone. It enables consumers to view inside the fridge with a smartphone while grocery shopping. It can access music or television cont... » read more

Prototype Like A Pro


FPGA-based prototyping has been a key prototyping technique for many years. The steady increase in software content and thus the need to verify and validate the SoC in context of the software has resulted in an equally steady increase in its usage. FPGA-based prototyping or physical prototyping, as it is also called, offers a great way to develop software, verify the hardware in context of that... » read more

The Big Shift


The number of chipmakers that truly can differentiate their products by moving to the next process node is falling, and that pool will continue to shrink even further over the next few years. Processor companies such as Intel and IBM always will benefit from scaling and architectural changes. So will GPU companies such as Nvidia, and FPGA vendors such as Xilinx, Microsemi and Altera (now par... » read more

Inside Advanced Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced IC-packaging, the OSAT industry, China and other topics with Ron Huemoeller, vice president of worldwide R&D at Amkor. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are we in advanced IC-packaging today? Huemoeller: We’ve hit the inflection point. Now we are coming to the other side of it. Regarding this need to int... » read more

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