Incremental Design Breakdown


For the past two decades, most designs have been incremental in nature. They heavily leveraged IP used in previous designs, and that IP often was developed by third parties. But there are growing problems with that methodology, especially at advanced nodes where back-end issues and the impact of 'shift left' are reducing the savings from reuse. The value of IP reuse has been well established... » read more

Overcoming The Growing Challenge Of Dynamic IR-Drop


IR-drop has always been somewhat of an issue in chip design; voltage decreases as current travels along any path with any resistance. Ohm’s Law is likely the first thing that every electrical engineer learns. But the challenges related to IR-drop (sometimes called voltage drop) have increased considerably in recent years, especially the dynamic IR-drop in the power/ground grid as circuits swi... » read more

How To Justify A Data Center


The breadth of cloud capabilities and improvements in cost and licensing structures is prompting chipmakers to consider offloading at least some of their design work into the cloud. Cloud is a viable business today for semiconductor design. Over the past decade, the interest in moving to cloud computing has grown from an idea that was fun to talk about — but which no one was serious about ... » read more

Blog Review: March 23


Arm's Ilias Vougioukas presents new ways to improve on virtual to physical memory translation without breaking any of the pre-existing hardware or software. Siemens' Scot Morrison considers the current regulatory landscape for security of medical devices, including how device manufactures need to proactively implement a plan to find, assess, and respond to potential vulnerabilities. Synop... » read more

CXL and OMI: Competing or Complementary?


System designers are looking at any ideas they can find to increase memory bandwidth and capacity, focusing on everything from improvements in memory to new types of memory. But higher-level architectural changes can help to fulfill both needs, even as memory types are abstracted away from CPUs. Two new protocols are helping to make this possible, CXL and OMI. But there is a looming question... » read more

System Innovation For Aerospace, Defense And Government


Tools for developer and user challenges Performance in a small package — low size, weight and power (SWaP) Long-life and upgradability with high-reliability, security, and safety Reliability in a range of operating environments, from ground to space End-to-end support: from the IoT network edge to the datacenter Process massively parallel sensor data with low latency S... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Alphawave IP will acquire the OpenFive business unit from SiFive. The $210 million cash deal will bring OpenFive’s high-speed connectivity SoC IP portfolio to Alphawave and nearly double its IPs currently available, including an expanded die-to-die connectivity portfolio as well as adding data center and networking custom silicon solutions. "When we completed our IPO in 2021, we committed to ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Supply chain issues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, will constrain automotive production in 2022 by 2.6mn units, predicts S&P Global Mobility (formerly known as the automotive team at I.H.S. Markit). Ukraine controls around half of high purity neon gas used to etch ICs — the low supply of which may continue to hurt the automotive industry — and the country makes a cable ... » read more

Blog Review: March 16


Ansys' Peter Hallschmid and Sandra Gely look at why, compared to rain and fog, snow is a different challenging environment for automotive sensors and how the random pattern of snowfall, properties of each flake, and the various distance between flakes play havoc on detecting objects. Siemens' Chuck Battikha focuses on how to protect against random hardware faults, the added costs of includin... » read more

Fundamental Shifts In IC Manufacturing Processes


High chip value and 3D packaging are changing where and how tests are performed, tightening design-for-reliability and accelerating the shift of tools from lab to fab. Heterogeneous integration and more domain-specific designs are causing a string of disruptions for chip manufacturers, up-ending proven fab processes and methodologies, extending the time it takes to manufacture a chip, and ul... » read more

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