Building Bridges: A New DFT Paradigm


Over the last twenty years, structural testing with scan chains has become pervasive in chip design methodology. Indeed, it’s remarkable to think that most electronic devices we interact with today (think smartphones, laptops, televisions, etc.) contain hundreds to thousands of interconnected scan chains used to verify that the semiconductors were manufactured without defects. Because the imp... » read more

Digital Twins Deciphered


Ever since Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics in 2016, a new phrase has become more common in the semiconductor industry – the digital twin. Exactly what that is, and what impact it will have on the semiconductor industry, is less clear. In fact, many in the industry are scratching their heads over the term. The initial reaction is that the industry has been creating what are now termed digi... » read more

Utilizing More Data To Improve Chip Design


Just about every step of the IC tool flow generates some amount of data. But certain steps generate a mind-boggling amount of data, not all of which is of equal value. The challenge is figuring out what's important for which parts of the design flow. That determines what to extract and loop back to engineers, and when that needs to be done in order to improve the reliability of increasingly com... » read more

The Automation Of AI


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the role that EDA has in automating artificial intelligence and machine learning with Doug Letcher, president and CEO of Metrics; Daniel Hansson, CEO of Verifyter; Harry Foster, chief scientist verification for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Larry Melling, product management director for Cadence; Manish Pandey, Synopsys fellow; and Raik Brinkmann, CEO ... » read more

Address Simulation Turn-Around Time Bottlenecks with VCS Fine-Grained Parallelism


Non-stop growth in design size and complexity makes it more difficult than ever for verification teams to keep up with project demands and product goals. According to the Synopsys 2017 Global User Survey, “Verification taking longer than planned” is the top reason for tapeout delays, and “Simulation runtime performance” is the top challenge for verification. Since regression test turn-a... » read more

Debug Changes At Advanced Nodes


Ribhu Mittal, emulation applications director at Synopsys, zeroes in on what’s changing in debug, including why traditional verification methods are failing in designs with 1 billion gates and a commensurate amount of software complexity. The key is how to maintain or reduce time to market, and that requires a different way of approaching the problem. » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 27


Rambus' Steven Woo takes a look at the memory requirements of neural networks and why some companies are using on-chip memory while others are using HBM2 or GDDR6. Cadence's Lana Chan  observes growing momentum for NVMe and highlights some new features in the latest specification that are pushing mainstream adoption forward. Mentor's Matthew Ballance contends that when it comes to adopti... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Second-tier cities in the U.S. that can’t attract projects like the Amazon HQ2 are welcoming the testing of autonomous vehicles, smart city technology, and advanced surveillance techniques, this analysis notes. What do they get in return? Much of the time, little or nothing. And bad things can happen. People have been throwing objects at Waymo vehicles in Chandler, Ariz., ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys announced several new products: a new test family, a physical verification solution, and a software library for neural net SoCs. TestMAX, the new family of test products, includes soft error analysis and X-tolerant logic BIST for automotive test and functional safety requirements. TestMAX enables test through functional high-speed interfaces and supports early validation of DFT logi... » read more

Gaps In 5G Test


Add one more industry to the long list that analysts expect 5G technology to disrupt—test. While the initial versions of this wireless technology will be little more than a faster version of 4G, concern is growing about exactly how to test the second phase of this technology, which will be based upon millimeter wave. A number of fundamental problems need to be addressed. Among them: T... » read more

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