Network Software Bring Up


By Tom De Schutter With their latest Cortex-A processors, and especially the ARMv8 Cortex-A57 processor, ARM has provided the right scalability and performance required for network applications. Porting and developing software for these multicore/multi-cluster designs, however, is not a trivial task and cannot be done as an afterthought. That is the topic that Robert Kaye from ARM and I addres... » read more

Observation Post


By Pranav Ashar After attending the 2013 Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) in San Jose, Calif., I have compiled notes as both an observer and a panel participant. Here are my observations: Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave the keynote presentation: Accelerating EDA Innovation Through SoC Design Methodology Convergence. Logically and effectively he made the case that SoC in... » read more

Staying Neutral


By Kurt Shuler It’s official: The great IP land grab has begun. The process actually has been taking place gradually, but has accelerated with Imagination Technologies’ acquisition of MIPS last year and, most recently, Cadence’s acquisition of Tensilica. For makers of semiconductors, four competing IP behemoths are emerging after years of fragmentation within the semiconductor IP indu... » read more

Market Realities


The speculation about EDA’s future—will it consolidate, will it be incorporated into large IDMs or foundries—has surfaced again. The reason this time is that EDA is in a retrenchment period as the semiconductor industry grapples with increasing complexity, multiple options ranging from multi-patterning to stacked die to more third-party IP, and the rising cost of complex SoCs at the mo... » read more

Physical Verification Of FinFETs And Fully Depleted SOI


It has become very difficult to effectively shrink traditional bulk planar transistors below 20nm due to physical effects that become dominant in very short conduction channels. The major impediment is an unacceptable rise in power consumption due to significant leakage currents. New transistor architectures are being adopted that offer a solution for these short-channel effects and allow trans... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power verification with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys; and Venki Venkatesh, senior director of engineering at Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

A Balancing Act


By Ann Steffora Mutschler If you stay current on data center trends, you are well-versed on the fact that Intel reported last June energy proportionality has effectively doubled server efficiency and workload scaling beyond what Moore’s Law predicted. What does this have to do with power management of SoCs? Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys, said tha... » read more

Moore’s Law 2.0


By Ed Sperling Doubling the number of transistors on a piece of silicon every 18 to 24 months used to be synonymous with engineering progress, but as the semiconductor world migrates from processors to SoCs the fundamental basis of Moore’s Law is losing its meaning. Even its famous timetable is slipping. For one thing, it’s simply too expensive and difficult to migrate from one node to ... » read more

Version Control


By Ed Sperling & Ann Steffora Mutschler One of the biggest impediments to progress in semiconductor design is progress itself—version after version of specifications, formats and increasingly IP. In fact, there are so many different versions, some of which conflict directly with each other, that it may take months or even years before some customers adopt new products. Much has ... » read more

Hot Stuff


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to thermal modeling, which has been practiced for many years, the challenges are daunting. The good news is that approaches are emerging as challenges increased with smaller process nodes and design complexity. Viewed from a number of viewpoints—transistor, chip, package, board and system—thermal models traditionally have been created from m... » read more

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