RISC-V Heralds New Era Of Cooperation


RISC-V is paving the way for open source to become accepted within the hardware community, creating a level of industry collaboration never seen in the past, while revitalizing the connection between academia and industry. The big question is whether this arrangement is just a placeholder while the industry re-learns how to develop processors, or whether this processor architecture is someth... » read more

The Evolution Of RISC-V Processor Verification: Open Standards And Verification IP


The OpenHW Group’s [1] Verification task group has been a pioneer in the development of methodologies and verification collateral for RISC-V processor verification. Since 2019 the members have worked together to develop CORE-V-VERIF: a UVM environment for the verification of RISC-V processor cores. Over this period of time the CORE-V-VERIF environment has evolved as new processor verification... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan Bosch, Infineon, and NXP were cleared in Germany to each acquire 10% of the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (ESMC), established by TSMC, solidifying the supply chain against future shortages, particularly for automotive chips. “ESMC intends to build and operate another large semiconductor factory in Dresden, in which the three Europ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys’ board of directors appointed Sassine Ghazi as president and chief executive officer effective on Jan. 1, 2024. Ghazi, who is currently the COO, will succeed Aart de Geus, co-founder, chair, and CEO of Synopsys, who will then become the executive chair of board of directors. IBM Research introduced  an energy-efficient mixed-signal analog AI chip for DNN inferencing and demonstra... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Siemens Digital Industries Software and climate-tech company sustamize devised a way to add carbon emissions data to Siemens Xcelerator. Siemens created its Teamcenter Carbon Footprint Calculator software to help teams measure, simulate, reduce, and track their product carbon footprint early in the development phase. The calculator uses sustamize’s Product Footprint Engi... » read more

How Mature Are Verification Methodologies?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss differences between hardware and software verification and changes and challenges facing the chip industry, with Larry Lapides, vice president of sales for Imperas Software; Mike Thompson, director of engineering for the verification task group at OpenHW; Paul Graykowski, technical marketing manager for Arteris IP; Shantanu Ganguly, vice president o... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


RISC-V RISC-V International announced four new specification and extension approvals. Efficient Trace for RISC-V defines an approach to processor tracing that uses a branch trace. RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface architects a firmware layer between the hardware platform and the operating system kernel using an application binary interface in supervisor mode to enable common platform services... » read more

IP Industry Transformation


The design IP industry is developing an assortment of new options and licensing schemes that could affect everything from how semiconductor companies collaborate to how ICs are designed, packaged, and brought to market. The IP market already has witnessed a sweeping shift from a "design once, use everywhere" approach, to an "architect once, customize everywhere" model, in which IP is highly ... » read more

The Challenges Of Incremental Verification


Verification consumes more time and resources than design, and yet little headway is being made to optimize it. The reasons are complex, and there are more questions than there are answers. For example, what is the minimum verification required to gain confidence in a design change? How can you minimize the cost of finding out that the change was bad, or that it had unintended consequences? ... » read more

Why RISC-V Is Succeeding


There is no disputing the excitement surround the introduction of the RISC-V processor architecture. Yet while many have called it a harbinger of a much broader open-source hardware movement, the reasons behind its success are not obvious, and the implications for an expansion of more open-source cores is far from certain. “The adoption of RISC-V as the preferred architecture for many sili... » read more

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