Embedded Microprocessor Extension Design and Optimization for Real-Time Edge Computing


Abstract "With the development of 5G communication technology, more and more applications could be integrated into one system. Edge computing system and mixed-criticality system may integrate tasks of different criticality levels, which brings better balance in isolation and performance. Such advantages make it gradually become a research hotspot in edge computing and real-time systems with ... » read more

Incremental Design Breakdown


For the past two decades, most designs have been incremental in nature. They heavily leveraged IP used in previous designs, and that IP often was developed by third parties. But there are growing problems with that methodology, especially at advanced nodes where back-end issues and the impact of 'shift left' are reducing the savings from reuse. The value of IP reuse has been well established... » read more

Which Processor Is Best?


Intel's embrace of RISC-V represents a landmark shift in the processor world. It's a recognition that no single company can own the data center anymore, upending a revenue model that has persisted since the earliest days of computing. Intel gained traction in that market in the early 1990s with the explosion of commodity servers, but its role is changing as processors become more customized and... » read more

Data Center Architectures In Flux


Data center architectures are becoming increasingly customized and heterogeneous, shifting from processors made by a single vendor to a mix of processors and accelerators made by multiple vendors — including system companies' own design teams. Hyperscaler data centers have been migrating toward increasingly heterogeneous architectures for the past half decade or so, spurred by the rising c... » read more

Why RISC-V Is Succeeding


There is no disputing the excitement surround the introduction of the RISC-V processor architecture. Yet while many have called it a harbinger of a much broader open-source hardware movement, the reasons behind its success are not obvious, and the implications for an expansion of more open-source cores is far from certain. “The adoption of RISC-V as the preferred architecture for many sili... » read more

How To Extend The ‘Unscalable’ RISC Architectures


A couple of years ago, Erik McClure (a Microsoft software developer, at the time) published a blog entitled RISC Is Fundamentally Unscalable.  This blog was really quite interesting and made some very good points about the limitations of a pure RISC design. The limitations of a pure RISC design It takes me back: some of my first marketing tasks were around the religious war between RISC ... » read more

Spreadsheets: Still Valuable, But More Limited


Spreadsheets have been an invaluable engineering tool for many aspects of semiconductor design and verification, but their inability to handle complexity is squeezing them out of an increasing number of applications. This is raising questions about whether they still have a role, and if so, how large that role will be. There are two sides to this issue. On one side are the users who see them... » read more

Do You Know For Sure Your RISC-V RTL Doesn’t Contain Any Surprises?


Given the relative novelty and complexity of RISC-V RTL designs, whether you are buying a commercially supported core or downloading a popular open-source offering, there is the small but non-zero risk of unwanted surprises escaping undetected into your end-product. In order of high-to-low probability, consider: The presence of a weird-yet-entirely-possible corner-case bug Bugs “insid... » read more

Growth Spurred By Negatives


The success and health of the semiconductor industry is driven by the insatiable appetite for increasingly complex devices that impact every aspect of our lives. The number of design starts for the chips used in those devices drives the EDA industry. But at no point in history have there been as many market segments driving innovation as there are today. Moreover, there is no indication this... » read more

Greener Design Verification


Chip designs are optimized for lower cost, better performance, or lower power. The same cannot be said about verification, where today very little effort is spent on reducing execution cost, run time, or power consumption. Admittedly, one is a per unit cost while the other is a development cost, but could the industry be doing more to make development greener? It can take days for regression... » read more

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