Software-Defined Vehicles


Automobiles long ago stopped being purely mechanical systems. But as more components are electrified — and, in particular, as the drivetrain is electrified — cars are becoming software-defined vehicles. Some think of such cars as computers on wheels. But as these systems continue to evolve, adding in more assisted and semi-autonomous capabilities, that comparison is looking increasingly ... » read more

Customization And Limitations At The Edge


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the edge constraints and the need for security with Jeff DeAngelis, managing director of the Industrial and Healthcare Business Unit at Maxim Integrated; Norman Chang, chief technologist at Ansys; Andrew Grant, senior director of artificial intelligence at Imagination Technologies; Thomas Ensergueix, senior director of the automotive and IoT line of... » read more

Better Security, Lower Cost


For years, chipmakers have marginalized security in chips, relying instead on software solutions. Eventually that approach caught up with them, creating near panic in a scramble to plug weaknesses involving speculative execution and branch prediction, as well as the ability to read the data from chips with commercially available tools such as optical probes. There were several reasons for th... » read more

Creating Better Models For Software And Hardware Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what's ahead for verification with Daniel Schostak, Arm fellow and verification architect; Ty Garibay, vice president of hardware engineering at Mythic; Balachandran Rajendran, CTO at Dell EMC; Saad Godil, director of applied deep learning research at Nvidia; Nasr Ullah, senior director of performance architecture at SiFive. What follows are excerpt... » read more

Challenges For A Post-Moore’s Law World


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss challenges at the edge, the impact of open-source, and how to attract new talent, with Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president of IC EDA at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Raik Brinkmann, CEO of OneSpin Solutions; Babak Taheri, CEO of Silvaco; John Kibarian, CEO of PDF Solutions; and Prakash Narain, CEO of Real Intent. The con... » read more

Rethinking Architectures Based On Power


The newest chips being developed for everything from the cloud to the edge of the network look nothing like designs of even a year or two ago. They are architected for speed, from the throughput of high-speed buses and external interconnects to the customized accelerators and arrays of redundant MACs. But many of these designs have barely scratched the surface for saving power, which will becom... » read more

The Increasingly Ordinary Task Of Verifying RISC-V


As RISC-V processor development matures and its usage in SoCs and microcontrollers grows, engineering teams are starting to look beyond the challenges of the processor core itself. So far, the majority of industry verification efforts have focused on ISA compliance to standardize the RISC-V core. Now the focus is shifting to be how to handle verification as the system grows, especially as this... » read more

Practical Processor Verification


Custom processors are making a resurgence, spurred on by the early success of the RISC-V ISA and the ecosystem that is rapidly building around it. But this shift is amid questions about whether processor verification has become a lost art. Years ago custom processors were common. But as the market consolidated around a handful of companies, so did the tools and expertise needed to develop th... » read more

Using Processor Trace At The System Level


The race to process more data faster using less power is creating a series of debug challenges at the system level, where developers need to be able to trace interactions across multiple and often heterogeneous processing elements that may function independently of each other. In general, trace is a hardware debug feature that allows the run-time behavior of IP to be monitored. More specific... » read more

Power Becomes Bigger Concern For Embedded Processors


Power is emerging as the dominant concern for embedded processors even in applications where performance is billed as the top design criteria. This is happening regardless of the end application or the process node. In some high-performance applications, power density and thermal dissipation can limit how fast a processor can run. This is compounded by concerns about cyber and physical secur... » read more

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