Blog Review: June 15


Ansys' Vidyu Challa considers common primary, or single-use, battery chemistries and how they affect that many important cell properties, such as energy density, flammability and safety, available cell constructions, temperature range, and shelf life. Synopsys' Rimpy Chugh and Rohit Kumar Ohlayan discuss some of the challenges arising from static linting of code, shifting linting left in the... » read more

Audio, Visual Advances Intensify IC Design Tradeoffs


A spike in the number of audio and visual sensors is greatly increasing design complexity in chips and systems, forcing engineers to make tradeoffs that can affect performance, power, and cost. Collectively, these sensors generate so much data that designers must consider where to process different data, how to prioritize it, and how to optimize it for specific applications. The tradeoffs in... » read more

Can Analog Make A Comeback?


We live in an analog world dominated by digital processing, but that could change. Domain specificity, and the desire for greater levels of optimization, may provide analog compute with some significant advantages — and the possibility of a comeback. For the last four decades, the advantages of digital scaling and flexibility have pushed the dividing line between analog and digital closer ... » read more

Emulation-Centric Power Analysis Of SoC Designs


Verification expert Lauro Rizzatti recently interviewed Jean-Marie Brunet, senior marketing director, Scalable Verification Solutions Division (SVSD), Siemens EDA, about the importance of accurate power estimation and optimization for system-on-chip (SoC) designs. What is the problem facing the semiconductor industry today regarding pre-silicon power estimation? The problem is the discrep... » read more

DRAM Thermal Issues Reach Crisis Point


Within the DRAM world, thermal issues are at a crisis point. At 14nm and below, and in the most advanced packaging schemes, an entirely new metric may be needed to address the multiplier effect of how thermal density increasingly turns minor issues into major problems. A few overheated transistors may not greatly affect reliability, but the heat generated from a few billion transistors does.... » read more

IP Industry Transformation


The design IP industry is developing an assortment of new options and licensing schemes that could affect everything from how semiconductor companies collaborate to how ICs are designed, packaged, and brought to market. The IP market already has witnessed a sweeping shift from a "design once, use everywhere" approach, to an "architect once, customize everywhere" model, in which IP is highly ... » read more

Removing Barriers For End-To-End Analytics


Parties are coming together, generating guidelines for sharing data from IC design and manufacturing through end of life, setting the stage for true end-to-end analytics. While the promise of big data analytics is well understood, data sharing through the semiconductor supply chain has been stymied by an inability to link together data sources throughout the lifecycle of a chip, package, or ... » read more

Automotive Bandwidth Issues Grow As Data Skyrockets


Bandwidth requirements for future vehicles are set to explode as the amount of data moving within vehicles, between vehicles, and between vehicles and infrastructure, continues to grow rapidly. That data will be necessary for a variety of functions, some of which are here today and many of which are still in development. On the safety side, that includes everything from early warning systems... » read more

Data Security Drives Innovative Verification Capabilities For SoCs


The protection and integrity of data is a key challenge for organizations and businesses as human interactions with computers have expanded enormously. This has created a vast amount of information and led to the age of “Big Data” where massive, rich data sets are collected and analyzed to advance knowledge and progress in multiple fields. The security of this data has become a critical nee... » read more

AI-Powered Verification


With functional verification consuming more time and effort than design, the chip industry is looking at every possible way to make the verification process more effective and more efficient. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being tested to see how big an impact they can have. While there is progress, it still appears to be just touching the periphery of the problem... » read more

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