RISC-V Heralds New Era Of Cooperation


RISC-V is paving the way for open source to become accepted within the hardware community, creating a level of industry collaboration never seen in the past, while revitalizing the connection between academia and industry. The big question is whether this arrangement is just a placeholder while the industry re-learns how to develop processors, or whether this processor architecture is someth... » read more

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

Power Issues Causing More Respins At 7nm And Below


Power consumption has been a major design consideration for some time, but it is far from being a solved issue. In fact, an increasing number of designs have a plethora of power-related problems, and those problems are getting worse in new chip designs. Many designs today are power-limited — or perhaps more accurately stated, thermal-limited. A chip only can consume as much power as it is ... » 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

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

The Challenges Of Incremental Verification


Verification consumes more time and resources than design, and yet little headway is being made to optimize it. The reasons are complex, and there are more questions than there are answers. For example, what is the minimum verification required to gain confidence in a design change? How can you minimize the cost of finding out that the change was bad, or that it had unintended consequences? ... » read more

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

Industry Transforming In Ways Previously Unimaginable


Early in the year, everyone expected that the availability of COVID vaccines would signal the start of a return to normal, but that has certainly not been the case. Now the industry is taking a longer-term view about how to transform business, what is necessary for people to maintain their mental health, and how to create robust hybrid work environments for the future that do not discard the po... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


MoSys, a provider of SRAM solutions and networking accelerators, and Peraso Technologies, a provider of 5G mmWave devices, are merging. Stockholders of Peraso are expected to hold a 61% equity interest in the combined company, with the remaining 39% equity interest to be retained by the stockholders of MoSys. Peraso CEO Ronald Glibbery said, "By joining with MoSys, we believe we can deliver a b... » read more

Standards, Open Source, and Tools


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering discussed what open source verification means today and what it should evolve into with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director for the Emulation Division at Siemens EDA; Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise; Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas Software; Serge Leef, program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA; Tao Liu, staff hardware engineer... » read more

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