Is Hardware-Assisted Verification Avoidable?


Emulation is emerging as the tool of choice for complex and large designs, but companies that swap from simulation to emulation increasingly recognize this is not an easy transition. It requires money, time, and effort, and even then not everyone gets it right. Still, there are significant benefits to moving from simulation to emulation, providing these systems can be utilized efficiently en... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 28


Synopsys' Jacob Wilson provides some tips for how to prepare for the upcoming ISO SAE 21434 cybersecurity standard for road vehicles, starting with a security plan and understanding of risk levels. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out Arm's first face-to-face wafer-bonded design, why it might be desirable, and some important aspects of how the proof-of-concept was developed. In a video, Men... » read more

Regaining The Edge In U.S. Chip Manufacturing


The United States is developing new strategies to prevent it from falling further behind Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps even China in semiconductor manufacturing, as trade tensions and national security concerns continue to grow. For years, the U.S. has been a leader in the development of new chip products like GPUs and microprocessors. But from a chip manufacturing standpoint, the U.S. is losin... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers AMD and Xilinx have entered into a definitive agreement for AMD to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction valued at $35 billion. With the proposed deal, AMD will enter the FPGA business, putting it further in competition with Intel. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the AMD and Xilinx boards. The transaction is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2021. U... » read more

Much Smarter Manufacturing


Smart manufacturing is undergoing some fundamental changes as more sensors are integrated across fabs to generate more usable data, and as AI/ML systems are deployed to sift through that data and identify patterns and anomalies more quickly. The concept of smart manufacturing — also referred to as Industrie 4.0 in Europe, for the fourth industrial revolution — emerged from the World Econ... » read more

Smart Backend Assembly Factory For Industry 4.0


I recently spoke with Chan Pin CHONG, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Products and Solutions at Kulicke & Soffa, about how smart manufacturing is driving new production efficiencies in the semiconductor industry. During our conversation, he also provided practical steps for factory operators to follow in evaluating their smart manufacturing needs in order to ensure successfu... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 21


Rambus' Frank Ferro and IDC's Shane Rau compare the evolution of HBM and GDDR6, as well as the design tradeoffs and challenges of the two memory types. Mentor's Neil Johnson compares unit testing and formal property checking as first steps for verifying low-level RTL functionality. Synopsys' Patrick Carey considers the competing demands of delivering a product as soon as possible and maki... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Intel is exiting the NAND flash market. SK Hynix and Intel announced that they have signed an agreement on Oct. 20, under which SK Hynix would acquire Intel’s NAND memory and storage business for $9 billion.The transaction includes the NAND SSD business, the NAND component and wafer business, and the Dalian NAND memory manufacturing facility in China. Intel will retain it... » read more

Why Data Format Slows Chip Manufacturing Progress


The Standard Test Data Format (STDF), a workhorse data format used to pull test results data from automated test equipment, is running out of steam after 35 years. It is unable to keep up with the explosive increase in data generated by more sensors in various semiconductor manufacturing processes. First developed in 1985 by Teradyne, STDF is a binary format that is translated into ASCII or ... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 14


Arm's Hongsup Shin explains a machine learning application that can determine which tests are most likely to find hardware bugs, improving efficiency and reducing the number of tests that need to be run. Synopsys' Pieter van der Wolf and Dmitry Zakharov take a look at the increasing need for low power processors optimized for machine learning tasks as IoT, smart home, and wearable devices pr... » read more

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