A New Dawn For IP


The IP industry is changing again. The concept started as build once, use everywhere, but today it is more like architect once, customize everywhere. Few designs can afford sub-optimal IP for their application. The need for customized IP is driven by both leading-edge designs and the trailing markets, although for different reasons. While this customization is causing IP companies to transfo... » read more

Defining And Improving AI Performance


Many companies are developing AI chips, both for training and for inference. Although getting the required functionality is important, many solutions will be judged by their performance characteristics. Performance can be measured in different ways, such as number of inferences per second or per watt. These figures are dependent on a lot of factors, not just the hardware architecture. The optim... » read more

A UFS Verification Closure Flow Using The Synopsys Verification Continuum Platform


It's a longstanding cliche, but it is true that “there is no silver bullet for functional verification.” No single tool or methodology can find and shoot down all the bugs in a large, complex semiconductor design. Simulation is well understood but can be slow for today's large SoCs. Emulation hardware is fast, but expensive enough that it is usually shared across a verification team. Formal... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 11


Arm's Urmish Thakker investigates ways to make recurrent neural networks run on resource constrained devices with limited cache and compute resources by reducing the number of RNN computations, without the need to retrain the original RNN model. Mentor's Brent Klingforth digs into the challenges of designing rigid-flex PCBs and how advanced capabilities in modern tools, like awareness of sta... » read more

5 Major Shifts In Automotive


Much of the automotive industry has begun repositioning and retrenching over the past few months, pushing back the projected rollout for fully autonomous vehicles and changing direction on power sources and technology used in the next-generation of electric vehicles. Taken together, these shifts mark a significant departure for traditional automakers, which find themselves playing catch-up t... » read more

The Growing Challenges Of 5G Reliability


The test field is getting more complicated as chips become larger, more heterogeneous, and subject to almost constant changes. Nowhere is this more evident than in 5G, where standards are still evolving and use cases are still being defined. Without passing test, no technology advances. But those definitions are subject to change, and they can change again over time. The communications in... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Cadence signed a deal to buy National Instruments’ AWR business unit for about $160 million in cash, a move that Cadence describes as a way to broaden its market into intelligent system design. AWR’s strength is high-frequency RF design automation tools, particularly in the millimeter wave and microwave spectrums, which are critical for radar and 5G. It also has technology for III-V materia... » read more

Week In Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things SiFive is bringing RISC-V to IoT makers and university developers through the RISC-V-based SiFive Learn Initiative, an open-source learning package that can be used to create a low-cost RISC-V hardware compatible with AWS IoT Core. The development platform SiFive Learn Inventor has a software package and education enablement course. It includes: The programmable SiFive Lear... » read more

A Trillion Security Risks


An explosion in IoT devices has significantly raised the security threat level for hardware and software, and it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Sometime over the next decade the number of connected devices is expected to hit the 1 trillion mark. Expecting all of them to be secure is impossible, particularly as the attack surface widens and the attack vectors become more sophisticated... » read more

Ensuring Functional Safety For Self-Driving Cars


There may be no hotter topic in electronics than chips for autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars have captured the public imagination and become a major area of investment. Both established automotive manufacturers and well-funded startups are producing vehicles with the highly complex chips needed to negotiate roads, deal with unpredictable humans and communicate with the cloud for machine le... » read more

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