Planning EDA’s Next Steps


Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's new CEO, and the recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award in December, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's next in EDA, the underlying technology and business challenges and changes, and new markets that are unfolding for floor-planning, verification, CFD, and advanced packaging. SE: Where does EDA need to improve? Devgan: We have made it much... » read more

Improving PPA In Complex Designs With AI


The goal of chip design always has been to optimize power, performance, and area (PPA), but results can vary greatly even with the best tools and highly experienced engineering teams. Optimizing PPA involves a growing number of tradeoffs that can vary by application, by availability of IP and other components, as well as the familiarity of engineers with different tools and methodologies. Fo... » read more

Meeting Processor Performance And Safety Requirements For New ADAS & Autonomous Vehicle Systems


By Fergus Casey and Srini Krishnaswami Innovation in today’s automotive industry is accelerating as companies race to be the market leader in safety and autonomous vehicles. With vehicle control moving from humans to the vehicles’ active safety systems, more sensors – cameras, radar, lidar, etc. – are being added to automotive systems. More sensors require more computational performa... » read more

Aprisa Place-And-Route For Low-Power SoCs


The Aprisa digital design software helps designers address the many challenges of low-power designs. Aprisa is the most flexible IC place-and-route tool on the market—it accepts all industry-standard power formats, has excellent correlation to third-party signoff tools, and is easy to install, set up, and use. With effective technology and impressive usability, the Aprisa software ensures cos... » read more

PPA(V): Performance-Per-Watt Optimization With Variable Operating Voltage


Performance-per-watt has emerged as one of the highest priorities in design quality, leading to a shift in technology focus and design power optimization methodologies. Variable operating voltage possess high potential in optimizing performance-per-watt results but requires a signoff accurate and efficient methodology to explore. Synopsys Fusion Design Platform, uniquely built on a singular RTL... » read more

HBM3: Big Impact On Chip Design


An insatiable demand for bandwidth in everything from high-performance computing to AI training, gaming, and automotive applications is fueling the development of the next generation of high-bandwidth memory. HBM3 will bring a 2X bump in bandwidth and capacity per stack, as well as some other benefits. What was once considered a "slow and wide" memory technology to reduce signal traffic dela... » read more

3D IC: Opportunities, Challenges, And Solutions


Nearly every big city reaches a point in its evolution when it runs out of open space and starts building vertically. This enables far more apartments, offices and people per square mile, while avoiding the increased infrastructure costs of suburban sprawl. Semiconductors are evolving in much the same way. Moore’s Law is slowing, and adoption of new advanced technology nodes is slowing as wel... » read more

Hyper-Convergence Is The New Normal For Digital Implementation


The era of smart-everything has led to a surge in the need for semiconductor devices across a myriad of traditional and novel applications. These applications demand high performance yet energy-efficient compute over blazing-fast networks to service trillions of edge devices that are constantly consuming and generating large amounts of data. This surge has invigorated system architects to innov... » read more

Tape Out On Time With Demand Signoff DRC In P&R


Physical characteristics of devices have become progressively more complex even as design companies pack more devices on each die. Combining these characteristics with ever more demanding chip power, performance, and area (PPA) goals not only result in increased resource utilization but also challenge existing tools/flows/techniques. Adding on-demand signoff-quality DRC verification inside P&R ... » read more

Best 112G SerDes IP Architecture


Real world operation of a serializer/deserializer (SerDes) in a hyperscale data center is very demanding and requires robust performance in challenging conditions such as multitude of channel insertion loss, extreme temperature cycles, different types of packages with different trace lengths and discontinuities, etc. Hence, meeting interference tolerance (ITOL) and jitter tolerance (JTOL) compl... » read more

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