What Makes RISC-V Verification Unique?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the verification of RISC-V processors with Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Mike Eftimakis, vice president for strategy and ecosystem at Codasip; Simon Davidmann, founder and CEO of Imperas Software; Sven Beyer, program manager for processor verification at Siemens EDA; Kiran Vittal, senior director of alliances partner... » read more

Who Does Processor Validation?


Defining what a processor is, and what it is supposed to do, is not always as easy as it sounds. In fact, companies are struggling with the implications of hundreds of heterogenous processing elements crammed into a single chip or package. Companies have extensive verification methodologies, but not for validation. Verification is a process of ensuring that an implementation matches a specif... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For RISC-V


High-quality RISC-V implementations are becoming more numerous, but it is the extensibility of the architecture that is driving a lot of design activity. The challenge is designing and implementing custom processors without having to re-implement them every time at the register transfer level (RTL). There are two types of high-level synthesis (HLS) that need to be considered. The first is ge... » read more

New Methodologies Create New Opportunities


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what open source verification means today and what it should evolve into, with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director for the Emulation Division at Siemens EDA; Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise; Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas Software; Serge Leef, program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA; Tao Liu, staff hardwa... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 3


World’s thinnest TFTs The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has devised the world’s thinnest flexible, 2D thin-film transistors (TFTs). The transistors are just 10 atomic layers thick. TFTs are typically used in screens and displays. In the lab, Argonne researchers fabricated the TFTs on both a conventional silicon platform and a flexible substrate. [caption i... » read more