Growth Spurred By Negatives


The success and health of the semiconductor industry is driven by the insatiable appetite for increasingly complex devices that impact every aspect of our lives. The number of design starts for the chips used in those devices drives the EDA industry. But at no point in history have there been as many market segments driving innovation as there are today. Moreover, there is no indication this... » read more

Greener Design Verification


Chip designs are optimized for lower cost, better performance, or lower power. The same cannot be said about verification, where today very little effort is spent on reducing execution cost, run time, or power consumption. Admittedly, one is a per unit cost while the other is a development cost, but could the industry be doing more to make development greener? It can take days for regression... » read more

Dependable Verification Is The Foundation ICs Require


As our world becomes increasingly high-tech, it is easy to lose sight of the little things that make all of our fancy gadgets achieve optimal performance. The one thread that enables you to get all of the benefits of a new laptop, tablet, smartphone, or your automobile’s digital dashboard and connects the components that ensure best performance is the integrated circuit (IC). For as breath... » read more

Veloce Coverage App And Veloce Assertion App Deliver Unified Coverage Methodology


The interoperability of the Veloce Coverage app and the Veloce Assertion app with other verification engines (simulation and formal) enables merging coverage collected by each engine and provides a cohesive coverage closure report and analysis flow. It enables the verification team and product-level management to make important decisions such as coverage closure sign-off, test quality analysis ... » read more

Will Steering Wheels Ever Disappear?


Autonomous vehicles are touted as the way of the future, and the general assumption is ultimately everything will be autonomous. But there are broad segments of the market where autonomy is unlikely to happen. There is no question that autonomy is possible. In fact, within certain bounds it's already here. Robo-taxis are available in some cities. Mercedes, Tesla, and Lexus are all touting so... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 19


Synopsys' Anand Thiruvengadam examines the memory chip design challenges of optimizing PPA, speeding turnaround time, and improving reliability and how a shift-left approach can help. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out some of TSMC's recent updates in 3D packaging and the importance of thermal analysis and finding the right balance between IR-drop and TSV usage in multi-chip physical verific... » read more

Bug Hunt! Spiraling In On Formal Coverage Closure


By Mark Eslinger and Jin Hou Many companies have used formal verification to verify complex SoCs and safety-critical designs. Using formal verification to confirm design functionalities and to uncover functional bugs is emerging as an efficient verification approach. Although formal verification will not handle the complexity of a design at the SoC level, it is an efficient tool to verify th... » read more

Is Programmable Overhead Worth The Cost?


Programmability has fueled the growth of most semiconductor products, but how much does it actually cost? And is that cost worth it? The answer is more complicated than a simple efficiency formula. It can vary by application, by maturity of technology in a particular market, and in the context of much larger systems. What's considered important for one design may be very different for anothe... » read more

Setting Ground Rules For 3D-IC Designs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

The Gargantuan 5G Chip Challenge


Blazing fast upload and download speeds for cellular data are coming, but making the technology function as expected throughout its expected lifetime is an enormous challenge that will require substantial changes across the entire chip ecosystem. While sub-6GHz is an evolutionary step from 4G LTE, the real promise of 5G kicks in with millimeter-wave (mmWave) technology. But these higher-freq... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →