Respect? Confused


In a recent story, I talked about how EDA has gained respect in the financial markets, which is something it has failed to do for decades. EDA, in the eyes of Wall Street, had become a plodder through good times and bad, failing to achieve the growth shown by semiconductor companies or foundries, or the rapid rise to glory of other software companies. Of course, it never experienced the same de... » read more

New Data Management Challenges


An explosion in semiconductor design and manufacturing data, and the expanding use of chips in safety-critical and mission-critical applications, is prompting chipmakers to collect and manage that data more effectively in order to improve overall performance and reliability. This collection of data reveals a number of challenges with no simple solutions. Data may be siloed and inconsistent, ... » read more

Industry Transformations In 2021 And Beyond


Last December, the name of my predictions blog summarized my view crisply, which is that "applications, ecosystems and system complexity will be key verification drivers for 2020." Slam dunk on these. Application domains significantly impacted verification aspects in 2020. Who would have thought that Facebook and AWS would be among the keynotes at our user conference, speaking about how thei... » read more

Verification Requirements For 5G To Enable A Perfect Storm Of New Applications


In my role as product management lead, to understand drivers for verification requirements and semiconductor markets I often exchange thoughts with customers what they think the next “killer app” would be. Ten years back, the drivers seemed pretty clear and segmented on a small number of applications, but the outlook today in 2019 is much more diverse. 5G networking seems to be a binding el... » read more

Cognitive Radio


[youtube vid=DYDZ64RtB_A] » read more

SOI Goes Mainstream


By Ed Sperling The crossover for system on insulator (SOI) versus bulk CMOS was supposed to happen at the 22nm, but that was before software developers ran into problems programming multicore chips. For years, SOI was considered the high-performance cousin of CMOS—more expensive, more difficult to manufacture and unnecessary for most applications. It is the heart of the Cell processor, ... » read more

Better Ways to Connect IP


By Ed Sperling Re-usable intellectual property may sound great on paper, but actually getting pieces to be as interchangeable as Lego parts and automatically configuring them to work in a system on a chip requires more than technology. It requires a leap of faith on the part of chip engineers, and that doesn’t happen overnight. The first step toward providing the tools was creation of the ... » read more