Data Strategy Shifting Again In Cars


Carmakers are modifying their data processing strategies to include more processing at or near the source of data, reducing the amount of data that needs to be moved around within a vehicle to both improve response time and free up compute resources. These moves are a world away from the initial idea that terabytes of streaming data would be processed in the cloud and sent back to the vehicl... » read more

What Makes A Chip Tamper-Proof?


The cyber world is the next major battlefield, and attackers are busily looking for ways to disrupt critical infrastructure. There is widespread proof this is happening. “Twenty-six percent of the U.S. power grid was found to be hosting Trojans," said Haydn Povey, IAR Systems' general manager of embedded security solutions. "In a cyber-warfare situation, that's the first thing that would b... » read more

Neuromorphic Computing Drives The Landscape Of Emerging Memories For Artificial Intelligence SoCs


The pace of deep machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world of computing at all levels of hardware architecture, software, chip manufacturing, and system packaging. Two major developments have opened the doors to implementing new techniques in machine learning. First, vast amounts of data, i.e., “Big Data,” are available for systems to process. Second, advanced ... » read more

Blog Review: June 3


Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at how Ethernet came to dominate wired networking and is now taking on automotive to provide the bandwidth necessary for the increasing number of sensors in modern vehicles. Mentor's Colin Walls notes the difficulty of assessing the quality of software, some key areas to pay attention to when assessing quality or trying to write quality code, and the bottom... » 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

High-Speed SerDes At 7/5nm


Manmeet Walia, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about how to optimize PHYs for integration on all four corners of an SoC, as well as the PPA implications of moving large amounts of data across and around a chip. » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Arm unveiled several new processor IPs. Targeting next-gen smartphones, the Cortex-A78 CPU provides a 20% increase in sustained performance over Cortex-A77-based devices within a 1-watt power budget, and more efficient management of compute workloads and on-device ML. The Mali-G78 GPU provides a 25% increase in performance over the Malti-G77. It supports up to 24 cores and in... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


An effort to fund U.S. science and technology initiatives with at least $100 billion is getting a thumbs up from the SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association). The Endless Frontier Act —  a bipartisan, bicameral bill introduced on Thursday in the U.S. House of Representatives — will invest money into semiconductor research and development and other related fields such as material science, q... » read more

What’s So Important About Processor Extensibility?


While the ability to extend a processor is nothing new, market dynamics are forcing a growing percentage of the industry to consider it a necessary part of their product innovation. From small IoT functions to massive data centers and artificial intelligence, the need to create an optimized processing platform is often the only way to get more performance or lower power out of the silicon area ... » read more

FPGA Prototyping Complexity Rising


Multi-FPGA prototyping of ASIC and SoC designs allows verification teams to achieve the highest clock rates among emulation techniques, but setting up the design for prototyping is complicated and challenging. This is where machine learning and other new approaches are beginning to help. The underlying problem is that designs are becoming so large and complex that they have to be partitioned... » read more

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