Cleared—And Verified—For Takeoff


If you’re like me, you’re probably not in any hurry to get on an airplane amidst our current global pandemic. Commercial air travel has declined dramatically as a result of the novel coronavirus—but beyond private and recreational travel, aviation remains an essential component of many key areas of modern life, including military and defense; commerce and package delivery; medical care; s... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP SiFive announced OpenFive, a self-contained and autonomous business unit that will offer custom silicon solutions with differentiated IP. OpenFive will be led by Dr. Shafy Eltoukhy, SVP, and general manager of OpenFive. OpenFive debuted with a new Die-to-Die (D2D) interface IP portfolio to serve next-generation chipset based designs for networking, HPC, and AI markets. The D2D p... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Pervasive computing — data center, edge, IoT SEMI formed a new standards committee to develop global standards for flexible hybrid electronics (FHE). The SEMI Standards Flexible Hybrid Electronics Global Technical Committee will develop FHE standards for design, materials, manufacturing, packaging and systems and to drive industry growth. IPC is also working on FHE standards as an industry s... » read more

Monitoring Chips After Manufacturing


New regulations and variability of advanced process nodes are forcing chip designers to insert additional capabilities in silicon to help with comprehension, debug, analytics, safety, security, and design optimization. The impact of this will be far-reaching as the industry discusses what capabilities can be shared between these divergent tasks, the amount of silicon area to dedicate to it, ... » read more

From Cloud To Cloudlets


Cloudlets, or mini-clouds, are starting to roll out closer to the sources of data in an effort to reduce latency and improve overall processing performance. But as this approach gains steam, it also is creating some new challenges involving data distribution, storage and security. The growing popularity of distributed clouds is a recognition that the cloud model has limitations. Sending the ... » read more

Welcome To 6 Minutes Of Security


Yet another blog on security! Oh, wait, this is hardware security – and trust. While secure hardware should be free from vulnerabilities in general, I use the term trust to refer to the belief that a semiconductor intellectual property (IP) or integrated circuit (IC) is free from malicious, intentionally inserted vulnerabilities. Hardware security is on the rise. The media is helping. ... » read more

Virtualization In The Car


As the automotive industry grapples with complexity due to electrification and increasing autonomy of vehicles, consolidation of ECUs within vehicles, more stringent safety and security requirements, automotive ecosystem players are looking to virtualization concepts in a number of ways to realize the vehicles of tomorrow. One way is with hardware virtualization; the ability of a device such... » read more

Shifting The Burden Of Tool Safety Compliance From Users To Vendors


Functional safety standards demand that this risk be assessed and adequately minimized through tool qualification and other processes. For engineering teams, this is a time-consuming task and, worryingly, one for which there are no mature solutions yet. Tool vendors may provide safety certificates or packages, in an attempt to support their customers with safety compliance. Strategies... » read more

The Evolution Of Digital Twins


Digital twins are starting to make inroads earlier in the chip design flow, allowing design teams to develop more effective models. But they also are adding new challenges in maintaining those models throughout a chip's lifecycle. Until a couple of years ago, few people in the semiconductor industry had even heard the term "digital twin." Then, suddenly, it was everywhere, causing confusion ... » read more

Open-Source Verification


Ask different people what open-source verification means and you will get a host of different answers. They range from the verification of open-source hardware, to providing an open-source verification infrastructure, to providing open-source stream generators or reference models, to open-source simulators and formal verification engines. Verification is about reducing risk. "Verification is... » read more

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