What’s So Important About Processor Extensibility?


While the ability to extend a processor is nothing new, market dynamics are forcing a growing percentage of the industry to consider it a necessary part of their product innovation. From small IoT functions to massive data centers and artificial intelligence, the need to create an optimized processing platform is often the only way to get more performance or lower power out of the silicon area ... » read more

Rising Packaging Complexity


Synopsys’ Rita Horner looks at the design side of advanced packaging, including how tools are chosen today, what considerations are needed for integrating IP while maintaining low latency and low power, why this is more complex in some ways than even the most advanced planar chip designs, and what’s still missing from the tool flow. » read more

Big Changes For eFPGAs


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the state of embedded FPGAs, why this is easier for some companies than others, why this is important for adding flexibility into an ASIC, and what are the main applications for this technology. » read more

The Meaning Of Verification


When I ask the question "Why do we do verification?" there are generally two types of responses. One of them sees the glass as half empty and the other as half full. It depends upon how you look at the problem and if you see verification as being a positive or negative operation. The negative answer is that we do verification to find bugs. This relies on the mechanical function of creating v... » read more

AI, Performance, Power, Safety Shine Spotlight On Last-Level Cache


Memory limitations to performance, always important in modern systems, have become an especially significant concern in automotive safety-critical applications making use of AI methods. On one hand, detecting and reporting a potential collision or other safety problem has to be very fast. Any corrective action is constrained by physics and has to be taken well in advance to avoid the problem. ... » read more

Enterprise-Class DRAM Reliability


Brett Murdock, product manager for memory interfaces at Synopsys, examines demand for DDR5 and DDR4 in both on-premise and cloud implementations, what features are available for which versions, how they affect performance and power, how ECC is implemented, and how the data moves throughout these systems. » read more

Understanding SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping)


Amol Borkar, senior product manager for AI and computer vision at Cadence, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about mapping and tracking the movement of an object in a scene, how to identify key corners in a frame, how probabilities of accuracy fit into the picture, how noise can affect that, and how to improve the performance and reduce power in these systems. » read more

Tradeoffs In Embedded Vision SoCs


Gordon Cooper, product marketing manager for embedded vision processors at Synopsys, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the need for more performance in these devices, how that impacts power, and what can be done to optimize both prior to manufacturing. » read more

Non-Volatile Memory Tradeoffs Intensify


Non-volatile memory is becoming more complicated at advanced nodes, where price, speed, power and utilization are feeding into some very application-specific tradeoffs about where to place that memory. NVM can be embedded into a chip, or it can be moved off chip with various types of interconnect technology. But that decision is more complicated than it might first appear. It depends on the ... » read more

Understanding the Interactions of Workloads and DRAM Types: A Comprehensive Experimental Study


Abstract "It has become increasingly difficult to understand the complex interaction between modern applications and main memory, composed of DRAM chips. Manufacturers are now selling and proposing many different types of DRAM, with each DRAM type catering to different needs (e.g., high throughput, low power, high memory density). At the same time, the memory access patterns of prevalent and... » read more

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