Blog Review: March 24


Arm's Brian Cline points to a project with GlobalFoundries to demonstrate the feasibility and readiness of high-density, face-to-face, wafer-bonded 3D stacking technologies for high performance, energy-efficient designs. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that while supply chain security risks aren't new, the recent SolarWinds breach should make everyone pay much more attention to dependencies... » read more

Accelerate Custom Layout Using Custom Compiler’s User-Defined Device (UDD)


In this 7th video of the series, Kai Wang, Director of Engineering at Synopsys, discusses in-design electrical analysis, and why it is critical to use signoff engines to check and fix resistance, capacitance and electromigration issues during layout. Click here to access this video whitepaper. » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm finalized its acquisition of data center chip startup Nuvia with a price of $1.4 billion. Nuvia is working on a data center SoC and Arm-based CPU core it claims will lower performance per total cost of ownership by matching high performance with high efficiency and limiting maximum power to that which can be dissipated in an air-cooled environment. Qualcomm said Nuvia’s technology wo... » read more

Blog Review: March 17


Synopsys' Chris Clark considers the growing number of automotive sensors and the cost/performance tradeoffs between edge computing capability, sensor fusion, sensor degradation, monitoring, and the maintenance of the software over the lifespan of a vehicle. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out how the process of loading the bootstrap into memory has changed over the years, from hand-entered on... » read more

Designing 2.5D Systems


As more designs hit the reticle limit, or suffer from decreasing yield, migrating to 2.5D designs may provide a path forward. But this kind of advanced packaging also comes with some additional challenges. How you adapt and change your design team may be determined by where your focus has been in the past, or what you are trying to achieve. There are business, organizational, and technical c... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Codasip unveiled three commercially licensed add-ons to the Western Digital SweRV Core EH1, aiming to allow it to be designed into a wider range of applications. The SweRV Core EH1 is a 32-bit, dual-issue, RISC-V ISA core with a 9-stage pipeline, open-sourced through CHIPS Alliance. The add-ons offer a floating-point unit (FPU) that supports the RISC-V single precision [F] and d... » read more

Domain-Specific Memory


Domain-specific computing may be all the rage, but it is avoiding the real problem. The bigger concern is the memories that throttle processor performance, consume more power, and take up the most chip area. Memories need to break free from the rigid structures preferred by existing software. When algorithms and memory are designed together, improvements in performance are significant and pr... » read more

Tradeoffs To Improve Performance, Lower Power


Generic chips are no longer acceptable in competitive markets, and the trend is growing as designs become increasingly heterogeneous and targeted to specific workloads and applications. From the edge to the cloud, including everything from vehicles, smartphones, to commercial and industrial machinery, the trend increasingly is on maximizing performance using the least amount of energy. This ... » read more

Addressing IC Hyperconvergence Design Challenges


Recently in an article titled “A Renaissance for Semiconductors,” my colleague Michael Sanie highlighted some of the trends that are driving next-generation product development. He detailed how designs targeting new applications are innovating through a combination of advanced process node technologies and heterogeneous integration of stacked die/3D/2.5D systems. Additionally, advanced vert... » read more

MRAM Evolves In Multiple Directions


Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) is one of several new non-volatile memory technologies targeting broad commercial availability, but designing MRAM into chips and systems isn't as simple as adding other types of memory. MRAM isn’t an all-things-for-all-applications technology. It needs to be tuned for its intended purpose. MRAMs targeting flash will not do as well targeting SRAMs, and vice vers... » read more

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