Why Parallelization Is So Hard


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about parallelization efforts within EDA with Andrea Casotto, chief scientist for Altair; Adam Sherer, product management group director in the System & Verification Group of Cadence; Harry Foster, chief scientist for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Vladislav Palfy, global manager for applications engineering at OneSpin; Vigyan Singhal, chief Oski for ... » read more

Partitioning Becomes More Difficult


The divide-and-conquer approach that has been the backbone of verification for decades is becoming more difficult at advanced nodes. There are more interactions from different blocks and features, more power domains, more physical effects to track, and far more complex design rules to follow. This helps explain why the number of tools required on each design—simulation, prototyping, em... » read more

More Nodes, New Problems


The rollout of leading-edge process nodes is accelerating rather than slowing down, defying predictions that device scaling would begin to subside due to rising costs and the increased difficulty of developing chips at those nodes. Costs are indeed rising. So are the number of design rules, which reflect skyrocketing complexity stemming from multiple patterning, more devices on a chip, and m... » read more

IP And Power


[getkc id="108" kc_name="Power"] is quickly becoming a major differentiator for products, regardless of whether they are connected to a wall outlet or dependent on a battery. At the same time, increasing amounts of a chips content comes from third-party [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"]. So how do system designers ensure that the complete system has an optimal power profile, and what can they do to ... » read more

Partitioning With Ease


Modern ASIC and SoC designs have increased in complexity such that multiple FPGAs of the largest capacity are now required to prototype the entire functionality of the design. As design sizes increase, more and more FPGAs are required. The capacity and pin limitations of FPGAs create constraints for how the ASIC/SoC design can be mapped into the FPGAs. Aldec’s HES-DVM's prototyping mode accou... » read more

Tech Talk: TCAM


Dennis Dudeck, IP solutions FAE at eSilicon, talks about how to save power and area with ternary content addressable memory. https://youtu.be/y1FhdoNdzOw » read more

Partitioning For Power


Examine any smartphone design today and most of the electronic circuitry is "off" most of the time. And regardless of how many processor cores are available, it's rare to use more than a couple of those cores at any point in time. The emphasis is shifting, though, as the mobility market flattens and other markets such as driver-assisted vehicles and IoT begin gaining traction. In a car, turn... » read more

Addressing Memory Characterization Capacity And Throughput Requirements With Dynamic Partitioning


Typical memory characterization techniques using memory compilers and instance-specific memories have a number of tradeoffs—development time, accuracy, performance, and more. Ad-hoc instance-specific characterization methods such as dynamic simulation, transistor-level static timing analysis, and divide-and-conquer suffer from multiple limitations that prohibit usage for 40nm technologies and... » read more

Team Work


While I am not much of a golf player, I participated in a golf tournament over the summer. It was a very friendly setup with teams of four playing against each other. Each player of the team hits his ball, and the ball that lands in the best position determines the starting point for every one of the team for the next stroke. The fact that only the best shot of the team counts, definitely ma... » read more

Hierarchy And Pain Management


By Bernard Murphy Hierarchy is unavoidable for any large design. It partitions development and verification complexity into digestible chunks. It enables parallel development on different parts of a system. It promotes reuse. And it provides a graceful method to partition for implementation. And yet, there are times when hierarchy gets in the way. The biggest drawback with hierarchy is that... » read more

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