Addressing Power Integrity Challenges For SoCs


Power integrity has become a crucial part of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) design flow because power-related issues can affect chip timing and even lead to complete device failure. Specifically, excessive rail voltage drop (IR-drop) and ground bounce can create timing problems and electromigration effects that impact a chip's performance and reliability. Analyzing a chip's power also poses diff... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 11


Mentor's Matthew Balance examines the separation of concerns between test intent and test realization in the Portable Stimulus specification. Synopsys' Deepak Nagaria checks out the features that makes LPDDR4 efficient in terms of power consumption, bandwidth utilization, data integrity and performance. Cadence's Meera Collier listens in as Chris Rowen considers whether AI processing shou... » read more

The 2017 International Test Conference


Machine learning is a hot topic at many technical conferences this year. It will be true at the upcoming International Test Conference, which opens near the end of this month in Fort Worth, Texas. On Sunday, October 29, there are two tutorials devoted to machine learning. Monday, October 30, will have one tutorial related to the topic. The conference gets fully under way on Halloween, wit... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Altair acquired Runtime Design Automation. Founded in 1995, Runtime provides tools for optimizing usage of EDA tools, including flow management, job scheduling, and license utilization, as well as tools for optimizing HPC network resources. Altair's focus is on engineering simulation, with tools for HPC resource management and IoT data analytics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. ... » read more

Functional Safety Issues Rising


Developing semiconductors for safety-critical markets such as automotive, industrial and medical involves a growing list of extra steps that need to be taken pre- and post-manufacturing to ensure product integrity, reliability and security. This is causing several significant changes: • Designs are becoming much more complicated because they require such features as failover and redundan... » read more

What’s Next for the IoT?


The Internet of Things continues to evolve, attempting to overcome its poor reputation for cybersecurity and making the case for wider adoption, especially by enterprises. Consumer IoT, largely represented in smart-home automation, remains a market being targeted by Amazon, Apple, Google, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, and other technology titans. The big bucks are in [getkc id="78" k... » read more

Achieving ISO 26262 Certification With ASIL-Ready IP


According to an article by McKinsey, “analysts predict revenue growth for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to be up to 29 percent, giving the segment one of the highest growth rates in the automotive and related industries.” This opportunity has invigorated the automotive supply chain to increase their R&D investments for faster product innovations. The focus on innovation is e... » read more

Ethernet’s Next Life


An ever-growing engagement with the Internet — where most of humanity and the ‘things’ we use are almost constantly connected and constantly storing, processing and retrieving data over a network — is increasing pressure to develop new standards, and much more quickly. Witness the timeline of Ethernet, and its humble beginnings as a standard protocol for moving data at 2.5 megabits p... » read more

Starting Point Is Changing For Designs


The starting point for semiconductor designs is shifting. What used to be a fairly straightforward exercise of choosing a processor based on power or performance, followed by how much on-chip versus off-chip memory is required, has become much more complicated. This is partly due to an emphasis on application-specific hardware and software solutions for markets that either never existed befo... » read more

Developing High-Reliability Reprogrammable NVM IP for Automotive Application


To help IC designers understand the complexities in developing the highest reliability non-volatile memory (NVM) IP for automotive applications, this white paper will review key considerations from design to test, including: key reliability specifications, designing-in reliability, and demonstrating reliability through characterization, qualification, and reliability testing. This paper helps I... » read more

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