Shift Left, Extend Right, Stretch Sideways


The EDA industry has been talking about shift left for a few years, but development flows are now being stretched in two additional ways, extending right to include silicon lifecycle management, and sideways to include safety and security. In addition, safety and security join verification and power as being vertical concerns, and we are increasingly seeing interlinking within those concerns. ... » read more

Improving Verification Predictability And Efficiency Using Big Data


Big data is a term that has been around for decades. It was initially defined as data sets captured, managed, and processed in a tolerable amount of time beyond the ability of normal software tools. The only constant in big data’s size over this time is that it’s been a moving target driven by improvements in parallel processing power and cheaper storage capacity. Today most of the industry... » read more

Automated Late Stage Timing-Aware Dynamic Voltage Drop ECO


One of the never-ending frustrations for electrical engineers is having to deal with counterproductive real-world effects that they wish would just go away. Examples include switch bounce, metastability, and contact resistance. For IC designers, dynamic voltage drop (DVD), also known as IR drop, is one of those unfortunate facts of the profession. There’s no way to avoid it; every trace and w... » read more

Why Comparing Processors Is So Difficult


Every new processor claims to be the fastest, the cheapest, or the most power frugal, but how those claims are measured and the supporting information can range from very useful to irrelevant. The chip industry is struggling far more than in the past to provide informative metrics. Twenty years ago, it was relatively easy to measure processor performance. It was a combination of the rate at ... » 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

Challenges With Stacking Memory On Logic


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

What’s Missing For Designing Chips At The System Level


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about design challenges in advanced packages and nodes with John Lee, vice president and general manager for semiconductors at Ansys; Shankar Krishnamoorthy, general manager of Synopsys' Design Group; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; and Andrew Kahng, professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. This discussion was held at the Ansys IDEAS co... » read more

MaxLinear And Calibre RealTime Digital


MaxLinear implemented the Calibre RealTime Digital interface for fast, iterative, signoff DRC checking and fixing during floorplanning and placement. They not only reduce the total of batch DRC iterations, but also eliminate potential late-stage issues during final physical verification signoff that are exponentially harder to fix. Adopting the Calibre RealTime Digital interface enabled MaxLine... » read more

Custom Designs, Custom Problems


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power optimization with Oliver King, CTO at Moortec; João Geada, chief technologist at Ansys; Dino Toffolon, senior vice president of engineering at Synopsys; Bryan Bowyer, director of engineering at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Kiran Burli, senior director of marketing for Arm's Physical Design Group; Kam Kittrell, senior product management group d... » read more

New Approaches For Hardware Security


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss a wide range of hardware security issues and possible solutions with Norman Chang, chief technologist for the Semiconductor Business Unit at ANSYS; Helena Handschuh, fellow at Rambus, and Mike Borza, principal security technologist at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. (L-R) Norman Chang, Helena Handschuh, Mike Borza. Pho... » read more

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