Blog Review: Feb. 14


Mentor's Matthew Hogan takes a look at why it's important to establish a baseline reliability verification process and how foundry rule decks fit in. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi digs into the issues with fitness tracker Strava's heatmap, how it could be manipulated, and why the risks of big data analytics go beyond wearables. Cadence's Paul McLellan points to research showing how easy it can ... » read more

Chip Aging Accelerates


Reliability is becoming an increasingly important proof point for new chips as they are rolled out in new markets such as automotive, cloud computing and industrial IoT, but actually proving that a chip will function as expected over time is becoming much more difficult. In the past, reliability generally was considered a foundry issue. Chips developed for computers and phones were designed ... » read more

GDDR6 PHYs: From The Data Center To Self-Driving Cars


The demand for ever-increasing bandwidth has resulted in a growing interest in GDDR across a number of market verticals, including data centers and the automotive sector. As an example of the former, deep learning applications require ever-increasing speed and bandwidth memory solutions in the data center. In deep learning and other emerging technologies, GDDR memory can help companies addre... » read more

Turning Down The Voltage


Designers of large, advanced-node SoCs are grappling with a number of pressures in the quest to achieve the optimal performance and power of their designs. This has turned into a challenging balancing act between using less power, especially for consumer technologies, while also providing the same or greater performance and increased functionality. [getkc id="108" kc_name="Power"] and perfor... » read more

Monetizing Semiconductors From Silicon To Services


In 2016, Rambus published a think piece titled “Charting a New Course for Semiconductors.” The paper explored a diverse range of challenges faced by the industry, including increasing development costs, shrinking margins, market saturation and accelerating M&A activity. These challenges have only become more pronounced in 2018, as the newly consolidated semiconductor industry actively seeks... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 7


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out why DARPA's excited about open-source IP at last year's RISC-V conference. Synopsys' Richard Solomon checks out what's new in PCIe 4.0, from the 16GT/s data rate to lane margining. Mentor's Colin Walls shares another set of tips for embedded software developers, including when to use [ ] and exception handling. Arm's Jason Andrews presents a tutorial ... » read more

Imperfect Silicon, Near-Perfect Security


Some chipmakers, under pressure to add security to rapidly growing numbers of IoT devices, have rediscovered a "fingerprinting" technique used primarily as an anti-counterfeiting measure. [getkc id="227" kc_name="Physically unclonable functions"] (PUFs) are used to assign a unique identification number based on inconsistencies in the speed with which current causes a series of logic gates to... » read more

Cheaper Packaging Options Ahead


Lower-cost packaging options and interconnects are either under development or just being commercialized, all of which could have a significant impact on the economics of advanced packaging. By far, the most cited reason why companies don't adopt advanced [getkc id="27" kc_name="packaging"] is cost. Currently, silicon [getkc id="204" kc_name="interposers"] add about $30 to the price of a med... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Startups Two new companies unveiled this week – Metrics Technologies and Movellus. Metrics Technologies is providing a Software-as-a-Service SystemVerilog simulator and verification manager that are available as pay-per-minute. This allows companies to have fully elastic system capabilities to accommodate peak simulation demand. “Cloud technology and Software as a Service business mo... » read more

Bypassing Encryption With Side-Channel Attacks


Devices and systems that implement robust encryption/decryption algorithms using cryptographic keys were historically considered secure. Nevertheless, there is a category of attacks that simply ignore the mathematic properties of a cryptographic system – and instead focuses on its physical implementation in hardware. This vector is known as side-channel attacks, which are commonly referred... » read more

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