Fast-Track Your Early SoC Design Exploration And Verification


By Nermeen Hossam and John Ferguson Most advanced node system-on-chip (SoC) designs are very large, and very complex. They typically contain many blocks and intellectual property (IP) that perform specialized functions, such as computation, internal communications, and signal processing. These blocks are often built by separate teams or IP suppliers, and integrated into the SoC layout. Howev... » read more

Open ISAs Gaining Traction


Open instruction set architectures are starting to gain a foothold, often in combination with other processors, as chipmakers begin to add more specialized compute elements and more flexibility into their designs. There are a number of these open ISAs available today, including Power, MIPS, and RISC-V, and there are a number of permutations and tools available for sale based on those archite... » read more

The Growing Impact Of Portable Stimulus


It has been a year since Accellera's Portable Test and Stimulus Specification became a standard. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact it has had, and the future direction of it, with Dave Kelf, chief marketing officer for Breker Verification Systems; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Tom Fitzpatrick, strategic verification architect for Mentor, a Siemen... » read more

A Specification-Driven Methodology For The Design And Verification Of Reset Domain Crossing Logic


Reset architectures have increased in complexity along with SoC designs. Sadly, traditional reset design and verification techniques have not evolved to address this increase in complexity. In order to avoid ad-hoc reset methods, this paper presents a three-step specification-driven methodology that provides a requirements-based approach for reset domain crossing design and verification. To ... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 25


Mentor's Dave Rich points out that unexpected values from a constraint solver can often be explained by how Verilog expression evaluation rules affect the solution space of SystemVerilog constraints. Cadence's Madhavi Rao points to the need for new and updated safety and cybersecurity standards for autonomous vehicles and highlights one of the most challenging parts of AV deployment. A Sy... » read more

EDA Revenue Up 6.6% For Q2


Highlighted by double digit growth in semiconductor IP and the Asia/Pacific region, EDA industry revenue increased 6.6% for Q2 2019 to $2,472.1 million, compared to $2,318.5 million in Q2 2018, according to the ESD Alliance Market Statistics Service. The four-quarters moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four quarters, increased by 6%, which represented a... » read more

FPGA Design Tradeoffs Getting Tougher


FPGAs are getting larger, more complex, and significantly harder to verify and debug. In the past, FPGAs were considered a relatively quick and simple way to get to market before committing to the cost and time of developing an ASIC. But today, both FPGAs and eFPGAs are being used in the most demanding applications, including cloud computing, AI, machine learning, and deep learning. In some ... » read more

3D Power Delivery


Getting power into and around a chip is becoming a lot more difficult due to increasing power density, but 2.5D and 3D integration are pushing those problems to whole new levels. The problems may even be worse with new packaging approaches, such as chiplets, because they constrain how problems can be analyzed and solved. Add to that list issues around new fabrication technologies and an emph... » read more

Trading Off Power And Performance Earlier In Designs


Optimizing performance, power and reliability in consumer electronics is an engineering feat that involves a series of tradeoffs based on gathering as much data about the use cases in which a design will operate. Approaches vary widely by market, by domain expertise, and by the established methodologies and perspective of the design teams. As a result, one team may opt for a leading-edge des... » read more

Place And Route Made Easier And Faster


By Allan Crone A predictable trend in IC design is the ever-increasing size and complexity of designs while keeping the time allocated for the projects the same or shorter. Along with the tape-out pressure, organizations need to find cost savings everywhere possible. Lowering the overall cost of ownership of EDA tools is a viable way to manage the design budget. Consequently, design teams ar... » read more

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