What You Needed To Know In 2023


I always use the last blog of the year to review everything published in the Systems & Design and Low Power – High Performance channels of Semiconductor Engineering, the two channels that I write for. It is useful to see what interests you and, as I have found in the past, it is an indicator of where the industry is going. You read about the issues you are facing as designers, and you nee... » read more

Dramatic Changes Ahead For Chips And Systems


Early this year, most people had never heard of generative AI. Now the entire world is racing to capitalize on it, and that's just the beginning. New markets, such as spatial computing, quantum computing, 6G, smart infrastructure, sustainability, and many more are accelerating the need to process more data faster, more efficiently, and with much more domain specificity. Compared to the days ... » read more

Dual Instruction-Set Architecture, Supporting A TTA And RISC-V Instruction Set Via a Lightweight Microcode Hardware Unit


A technical paper titled “Energy-Efficient Exposed Datapath Architecture With a RISC-V Instruction Set Mode” was published by researchers at Tampere University. Abstract: "Transport triggered architectures (TTAs) follow the static programming model of very long instruction word (VLIW) processors but expose additional information of the processor datapath in the programming interface, whic... » read more

System State Challenges Widen


Knowing the state of a system is essential for many analysis and debug tasks, but it's becoming more difficult in heterogeneous systems that are crammed with an increasing array of features. There is a limit as to how many things engineers can keep track of, and the complexity of today's systems extends far beyond that. Hierarchy and abstraction are used to help focus on the important aspect... » read more

The Evolution Of RISC-V Processor Verification: Open Standards And Verification IP


The OpenHW Group’s [1] Verification task group has been a pioneer in the development of methodologies and verification collateral for RISC-V processor verification. Since 2019 the members have worked together to develop CORE-V-VERIF: a UVM environment for the verification of RISC-V processor cores. Over this period of time the CORE-V-VERIF environment has evolved as new processor verification... » read more

Fast Interrupt Extension For MCU RISC-V


A technical paper titled “CV32RT: Enabling Fast Interrupt and Context Switching for RISC-V Microcontrollers” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich and University of Bologna. Abstract: "Processors using the open RISC-V ISA are finding increasing adoption in the embedded world. Many embedded use cases have real-time constraints and require flexible, predictable, and fast reactive handl... » read more

Coding And Debugging RISC-V


As monolithic device scaling continues to wind down and evolve toward increasingly heterogeneous designs, it has created an inflection point for chip architects to create customized cores that are much more energy efficient and faster than off-the-shelf processors. Zdeněk Přikryl, CTO of Codasip, talks about where RISC-V fits into this picture, using a modular ISA and custom instruction layer... » read more

Potentials And Issues Of Designing Fault-Tolerant Hardware Acceleration For Edge-Computing Devices


A technical paper titled “Fault-Tolerant Hardware Acceleration for High-Performance Edge-Computing Nodes” was published by researchers at University of Rome. Abstract: "High-performance embedded systems with powerful processors, specialized hardware accelerators, and advanced software techniques are all key technologies driving the growth of the IoT. By combining hardware and software tec... » read more

CPU Fuzzing Via Intricate Program Generation (ETH Zurich)


A technical paper titled “Cascade: CPU Fuzzing via Intricate Program Generation” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract: "Generating interesting test cases for CPU fuzzing is akin to generating programs that exercise unusual states inside the CPU. The performance of CPU fuzzing is heavily influenced by the quality of these programs and by the overhead of bug detection. Our a... » read more

FIR And Median Filter Accelerators In CodAL


5G is the latest generation of cellular networks using the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5G New Radio air interface. Unlike previous generations of network (2G, 3G & 4G) which had a one-size-fits-all approach, 5G aims to address a wide range of very different applications. To flexibly support diverse quality of service requirements, network slicing is introduced to enable mul... » read more

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