tag: Open-Silicon

Routing Congestion Returns
By Ed Sperling - 26 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Routing congestion has returned with a vengeance to SoC design, fueled by the advent of more third-party IP, more memory, a variety of new features, as well as the inability to scale wires at the same rate as transistors. This is certainly not a foreign concept for IC design. The markets for place and route tools were driven largely by the need to automate this kind of operat... » read more

SoC Platforms Gain Steam
By Ed Sperling - 26 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Platforms are attracting far more attention from makers of SoCs because they are pre-verified and can speed time to market, but the shift isn’t so simple. It will spark major changes in the way companies design and build chips, causing significant disruption across the entire SoC ecosystem. Platforms are nothing new in the processor and software world. Intel, IBM AMD, and N... » read more

Leveraging The Past
By Ed Sperling - 28 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler It’s easy to forget that not every design today is targeted at 20nm, given the amount of focus put on the bleeding edge of technology. But in fact a large number of designs utilize the stability and reliability of older manufacturing nodes, as well as lower mask costs, by incorporating new design and verification techniques, with 2.5D designs being a prime example. ... » read more

IP That Makes IP Work
By Frank Ferro - 28 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro Just how important are IP subsystems to complex SoC designs? It appears much more than you may have thought just a few months ago. With the emergence of SoCs that now support the cloud computing revolution and every major cloud-connected device, SoC complexity is increasing at a dizzying pace. We commonly now see increasing number of IP cores, cores from multiple sources, di... » read more

Power Shift
By Ed Sperling - 14 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For the past decade, most of the real gains in energy efficiency were developed for chips inside mobile electronics because of the demand for longer battery life. Dark silicon now represents the majority of mobile devices, multiple power islands are commonplace to push many functions into deep sleep, and performance is usually the secondary concern for most applications. Whil... » read more

Executive Briefing: Making Derivative ICs Better
By Ed Sperling - 31 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

Naveed Sherwani, CEO of Open-Silicon, talks with System-Level Design about pain points in design, hardware-software co-design, derivative chips, what's missing in tools flows and the need for a deeper understanding of IP. [youtube vid=5BGck8Fm5Fo] » read more

Packaging Tradeoffs More Complex Than Ever
By Ed Sperling - 24 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Driven by high-speed interfaces, the demand for TSVs and the complexities that new process nodes bring, older packaging technologies like wirebonding can’t keep up. The latest and greatest flip chip technologies offer much more flexibility, but at a cost. As such, the package plays a larger role than ever in determining system specifications because, depending o... » read more

Gap Vs. Gap
By Ed Sperling - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Among tools vendors it’s been standard practice to listen closely to customers but not deliver everything they ask for—or at least not always on the customers’ timetable. This strategy has worked well enough for both sides in the past, but at 20nm and in stacked die configurations, the level of tension between these two worlds is increasing, and the gaps in the tool cha... » read more

Rethinking Timing Optimization
By Ed Sperling - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler As semiconductor manufacturing technology continues its march toward 20nm, SoCs are plagued with advanced interconnect delays, cross capacitance, and process variability, as well as area and power constraints—and the significance of these factors is increasing with each passing node. “With lower nodes we are getting advantage on area, more and more logic is get... » read more

From Cryptic Error Messages To Contradictory Commands
By Ed Sperling - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler For the past 30 years, semiconductor designers have increasingly relied on automated CAD tools to complete their projects. Over time, these tools have indeed improved from a functionality perspective, but sometimes usability has not kept up with users’ needs. Depending on which tools and what type of use, some tools are easier to use than others, according to Mik... » read more

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