Have It All With No-Compromise DFT


The dramatic rise in manufacturing test time for today’s large and complex SoCs is rooted in the use of traditional approaches to moving scan test data from chip-level pins to core-level scan channels. The pin-multiplexing (mux) approach works fine for smaller designs but can become problematic with an increase in the number of cores and the design complexity on today’s SoCs. The next revol... » read more

Roaring ’20s For The Chip Industry


2020 was a good year for the semiconductor industry and the EDA industry that fuels it, but 2021 has the opportunity to be even better. New end application markets continue to open, and what were once seen as technical hurdles are leading to a multitude of innovative solutions, all of which need suitable tooling. No company can afford to invest everywhere, and so for EDA companies, their rel... » read more

Big Changes In Verification


Verification is undergoing fundamental change as chips become increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and integrated into larger systems. Tools, methodologies, and the mindset of verification engineers themselves are all shifting to adapt to these new designs, although with so many moving pieces this isn't always so easy to comprehend. Ferreting out bugs in a design now requires a multi-faceted... » read more

Taming Non-Predictable Systems


How predictable are semiconductor systems? The industry aims to create predictable systems and yet when a carrot is dangled, offering the possibility of faster, cheaper, or some other gain, decision makers invariably decide that some degree of uncertainty is warranted. Understanding uncertainty is at least the first step to making informed decisions, but new tooling is required to assess the im... » read more

Streaming Scan Network


The increasing complexity in large System on Chip (SoC) designs present challenges to design-for-test (DFT). Hierarchical DFT alleviates some of those challenges, by itself, is no longer enough. Adding Tessent Streaming Scan Network (SSN) technology eliminates the difficult and costly trade-offs between test implementation effort and manufacturing test cost by decoupling core-level and chip-lev... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive/Mobility Former U.S. president Donald Trump pardoned the former Google engineer who plead guilty to taking Google’s self-driving car trade secrets before becoming the head of Uber Technologies’ self-driving car unit. Anthony Levandowski was sentenced 18 months in prison in August after pleading guilty in March to one count of a 33-charge indictment, according to a story in Reute... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 20


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster takes a look at the amount of time IC and ASIC projects spend in verification, changes in the number of engineers on a project, and how engineers are spending their time. Synopsys' Stelios Diamantidis considers the importance of specialized accelerators for AI workloads as both cloud and edge push the PPA limits of current technologies. Cadence's Paul McLellan p... » read more

Hidden Costs In Faster, Low-Power AI Systems


Chipmakers are building orders of magnitude better performance and energy efficiency into smart devices, but to achieve those goals they also are making tradeoffs that will have far-reaching, long-lasting, and in some cases unknown impacts. Much of this activity is a direct result of pushing intelligence out to the edge, where it is needed to process, sort, and manage massive increases in da... » read more

Von Neumann Is Struggling


In an era dominated by machine learning, the von Neumann architecture is struggling to stay relevant. The world has changed from being control-centric to one that is data-centric, pushing processor architectures to evolve. Venture money is flooding into domain-specific architectures (DSA), but traditional processors also are evolving. For many markets, they continue to provide an effective s... » read more

Achieving Physical Reliability Of Electronics With Digital Design


By John Parry and G.A. (Wendy) Luiten With today’s powerful computational resources, digital design is increasingly used earlier in the design cycle to predict zero-hour nominal performance and to assess reliability. The methodology presented in this article uses a combination of simulation and testing to assess design performance, providing more reliability and increased productivity. ... » read more

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