Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Intel will acquire Barefoot Networks, a maker of programmable Ethernet switch silicon and the P4 networking programming language for data centers. Founded in 2013, the Santa Clara-based company has raised $155.4 million in funding. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Intel expects the acquisition to be final in the third quarter of this year. Tools & IP Mentor extended it... » read more

Data Confusion At The Edge


Disparities in pre-processing of data at the edge, coupled with a total lack of standardization, are raising questions about how that data will be prioritized and managed in AI and machine learning systems. Initially, the idea was that 5G would connect edge data to the cloud, where massive server farms would infer patterns from that data and send it back to the edge devices. But there is far... » read more

Disregard Safety And Security At Your Own Peril


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss industry attitudes towards safety and security with Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification; Jacob Wiltgen, solutions architect for functional safety at Mentor, a Siemens Business; David Landoll, solutions architect for OneSpin Solutions; Dennis Ciplickas, vice president of characterization solutions at PDF Solutions; Andrew Dauma... » read more

Moore Open Source Coming


The sunsetting of Moore's Law is creating some interesting ripples throughout the EDA and IP industries. No longer is the low-risk path defined by a migration to the next node. Most companies cannot afford it and don’t need it. Neither can their competitors. Suddenly, they have to do more with less, or at least the same amount. Consider just a few things that are changing today: Stick... » read more

Why IP Quality Is So Difficult To Determine


Differentiating good IP from mediocre or bad IP is getting more difficult, in part because it depends up on how and where it is used and in part because even the best IP may work better in one system than another—even in chips developed by the same vendor. This has been one of the challenges with IP over the years. In many cases, IP is poorly characterized, regardless of whether that IP wa... » read more

Extending RISC-V ISA With Custom Instruction Set Extension


RISC-V ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) is designed in a modular way. It means that the ISA has several groups of instructions (ISA extensions) that can be enabled or disabled as needed. This allows implementing precisely the instruction groups that the application needs, without having to pay for area or power that will not be used. One of the groups is special; it has no predefined instruct... » read more

Evolution Of Verification Engineers


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the implications of having an executable specification that drives verification with Hagai Arbel, chief executive officer for VTool; Adnan Hamid, chief executive office for Breker Verification; Mark Olen, product marketing manager for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Jim Hogan, managing partner of Vista Ventures; Sharon Rosenberg, senior solutions archit... » read more

More Memory And Processor Tradeoffs


Creating a new chip architecture is becoming an increasingly complex series of tradeoffs about memories and processing elements, but the benefits are not always obvious when those tradeoffs are being made. This used to be a fairly straightforward exercise when there was one processor, on-chip SRAM and off-chip DRAM. Fast forward to 7/5nm, where chips are being developed for AI, mobile ph... » read more

Preparing For War On The Edge


War clouds are gathering over the edge of the network. The rush by the reigning giants of data—IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Alibaba, Baidu, Microsoft and Apple—to control the cloud by building mammoth hyperscale data centers  is being met with uncertainty at the edge of the network. In fact, just the emergence of the edge could mean that all bets are off when it comes to data dominance. It... » read more

The 7nm Pileup


The number of 7nm designs is exploding. Cadence alone reports 80 new 7nm chips under design. So why now, and what does this all mean? First of all, 7nm appears to be the next 28nm. It's a major node, and it intersects with a number of broad trends that are happening across the industry, all of which involve AI in one way or another. The big question now is how many of them will survive long ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →