Physical Verification For Silicon Photonics: Don’t Panic!


Silicon photonics augments traditional electrical signals in integrated circuits (ICs) with light transmission to speed up data transfer and reduce power consumption. According to MarketsandMarkets, the overall silicon photonics market is worth approximately $774.1M in 2018, and is expected to reach $1,988.2M by 2023, at a CAGR of 20.8% between 2018 and 2023  [1]. Cloud computing is one market... » read more

‘Fuzzing’ A Virtual Prototype ECU To Improve Security


Staying ahead in the arms race against hackers means constantly looking for novel ways to find and correct security flaws, including (and perhaps especially) when it comes to relatively low-level hardware. In this brief white paper we describe one such way — an automated fuzzing test of a virtual ECU to find and correct vulnerabilities during the upstream development process. To read more,... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 5


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks at a case of exploding costs – up to $17 million – when the city of Atlanta, Georgia fell victim to the SamSam ransomware, plus the lessons other cities can take to improve their security. Cadence's Paul McLellan traces how a landmark moment in object recognition, the ImageNet database, has spurred increasingly better object recognition algorithms for alm... » read more

Using More Verification Cores


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about parallelization efforts within EDA with Andrea Casotto, chief scientist for Altair; Adam Sherer, product management group director in the System & Verification Group of Cadence; Harry Foster, chief scientist for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Vladislav Palfy, global manager for applications engineering at OneSpin; Vigyan Singhal, chief Oski for ... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 29


Mentor's Joe Hupcey III addresses inconclusive results in formal verification with tips on how to reduce the complexity of “assumption” properties to make them easier for the formal engines to digest and reach a solution. Cadence's Meera Collier looks beyond the immediate appeal of autonomous cars to the broader social implications of urban sprawl, public transit funding, and gentrificat... » read more

Is Software Necessary?


Hardware must be capable of running any software. While that might have been a good mantra when chips were relatively simple, it becomes an impossible verification task when dealing with SoCs that contain dozens of deeply embedded processors. When does it become necessary to use production software and what problems can that get you into? When verification targets such as power are added, it... » read more

Digital IC Bring-Up With A Bench-Top Environment


One of the hottest markets for IC today is artificial intelligence (AI). The designs for AI chips are also among the largest and most complex, with billions of transistors, thousands of memory instances, and complex design-for-test (DFT) implementations with unique bring up and debug requirements. At this point, the volume of new AI chips is relatively low, but time-to-market is of paramount im... » read more

Big Changes For Mainstream Chip Architectures


Chipmakers are working on new architectures that significantly increase the amount of data that can be processed per watt and per clock cycle, setting the stage for one of the biggest shifts in chip architectures in decades. All of the major chipmakers and systems vendors are changing direction, setting off an architectural race that includes everything from how data is read and written in m... » read more

Accelerating Test Pattern Bring-Up For Rapid First Silicon Debug


Reducing the time spent on silicon bring-up is critical in getting ICs into the hands of customers and staying competitive. Typically, the silicon bring-up process involves converting the test patterns to a tester-specific format and generating a test program that is executed by Automatic Test Equipment (ATE). This standard silicon bring-up flow is becoming too slow and expensive, especially fo... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 22


Cadence's Paul McLellan considers how much further we need to go to make EUV work for 5nm, the problem of cost, and ASML's EUV roadmap. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls explains optimizing data in embedded software with a simple example of two ways to put data in memory and how to decide which is best. Synopsys' Fred Bals provides a rundown of the different types of application security t... » read more

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