Experts At The Table: Designing At 28nm And Beyond


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to talk about design at future process nodes with Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for Cadence’s System Development Suite; Behrooz Zahiri, vice president of marketing at Magma (and currently director of marketing at Synopsys), and... » read more

Experts At The Table: Designing At 28nm And Beyond


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to talk about design at future process nodes with Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for Cadence’s System Development Suite; Behrooz, Zahiri, vice president of marketing at Magma (and currently director of marketing at Synopsys), an... » read more

Experts At The Table: Designing At 28nm And Beyond


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to talk about design at future process nodes with Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for Cadence’s System Development Suite; Behrooz, Zahiri, vice president of marketing at Magma (and currently director of marketing at Synopsys), an... » read more

Managing Complexity With Advanced Packaging


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Engineering teams across the globe continue to pound the process geometry treadmill to stay on the curve of Dr. Moore to achieve better speed or lower power or smaller die—and it all adds up to increased complexity in the design and packaging. However, with advanced forms of die stacking such as package-on-package, silicon-in-package, 2.5D silicon interposer techno... » read more

SoCs Go Mainstream


By Ed Sperling The monolithic ASIC, which has been the bread-and-butter of chipmakers for decades, is giving way to systems on a chip among mainstream chipmakers and at mainstream process nodes. This shift has been overhyped, overpromised and slow to materialize. While SoCs have been common for years in mobile electronics and for high-performance platforms such as gaming consoles, they have... » read more

The Downside Of Derivatives


By Ann Steffora Mutschler From a planning perspective, creating derivative chips seems a straightforward task, but the process is much more complex than simply replacing or adding a peripheral—it starts with identifying the right team of engineers to perform that process. “One of the needs in the market is somebody to have vertical expertise to do derivative design and yet be cost-effec... » read more

Derivative ICs: A Look At The Options


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the cost of designing and producing even moderately advanced SoCs skyrocketing, semiconductor companies and systems houses must find ways to defray the cost across a larger number of end uses than ever. As such many companies have adopted a platform-based derivative design approach, with that the platform serving as the first SoC design of a new family. That s... » read more

Different Tradeoffs


By Ed Sperling The push to “smaller, faster and cheaper” hasn’t changed since ICs were first introduced, but the context for those requirements is beginning to shift—with enormous consequences. What was once done on multiple chips continue to migrate to a single chip or package because of cost, but in some cases the decisions about goes where go well beyond an individual device to i... » read more

Reverse Engineering


By Ed Sperling Fabs and foundries frequently have been the savior of flawed designs, fixing problems such as power and performance, identifying design issues and often developing solutions to those problems. Over the next couple of process nodes, and in stacked die that will span multiple processes, there will be far fewer saves coming from the back end. Double and triple patterning, stress... » read more

Will It Work?


By Ed Sperling Estimates of how much time it takes to verify a complex SoC are still hovering around 70% of the total non-recurring engineering costs, but with more unknowns and more things to verify it’s becoming harder to keep that number from growing. Verification has always been described as an unbounded problem. You can always verify more, and just knowing when to call it quits is so... » read more

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