Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Cadence bought Pulsic, a U.K.-based developer of place-and-route tools for custom digital and analog. The acquisition follows a previous acquisition attempt by a Chinese firm in August 2022, which was blocked by the U.K. government. At the G7 Summit in Japan, IBM announced a 10-year, $100 million initiative with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago to develop a quantum-centr... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Quantum computing Baidu introduced a 10-qubit quantum computer called Qianshi and what it described as “the world's first all-platform quantum hardware-software integration solution that provides access to various quantum chips via mobile app, PC, and cloud.” The company said it has also completed the design of a 36-qubit quantum chip. Scientists said “levitating” nanoparticles co... » 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

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Synopsys is joining Microsoft in the U.S. Department of Defense's Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) program to support the development of IC hardware and workflow prototypes that incorporate Synopsys' assured design and manufacturing flows into Microsoft Azure. The RAMP program aims to bring commercial capabilities and speed to the development of semiconductors fo... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Aldec released the latest version of its Riviera-PRO verification platform, adding QEMU Bridge to enable hardware/software co-simulation of designs intended to run on SoC FPGAs. Other features include improved performance when using code containing many inline randomized calls and up to 29% faster simulation speed of UVM. Pulsic added new features to its Unity Bus Planner for planning... » read more

Analog’s Day Of Reckoning


The numbers being touted by the semiconductor industry for IoT edge devices are staggering. How they are going to be used, who will make them, or indeed who will make money from them are much less certain. The industry seems to be clear about the content of these devices. A small processor, some flash memory or possibly even some of the new memory technologies that are coming along, a radio ... » read more

The Road Ahead For 2014: Tools


In the third and final part of this predictions series we see the natural conclusion of market shifts that are driving changes in semiconductors, and which in turn drive the tools and IP needed to create those systems. To be expected, the changes fall into a few areas: New tools, techniques and changes required for smaller geometries; A migration to higher-levels of abstraction and the... » read more