Ensuring Chip Reliability From The Inside


Monitoring activity and traffic is emerging as an essential ingredient in complex, heterogeneous chips used in automotive, industrial, and data center applications. This is particularly true in safety-critical applications such as automotive, where much depends on the system operating exactly right at all times. To make autonomous and assisted driving possible, a mechanism to ensure systems ... » read more

Blog Review: May 23


Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into the problems of test for 3D ICs s well as new approaches to cell-aware test, modular test and realistic IR drop at CDNLive EMEA. Mentor's Colin Walls shares four more embedded software tips, including always initializing a variable and when to use ++i instead of i++. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding points to a new way that phishing attacks could get around Mic... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A IoT-focused memory chipmaker Adesto Technologies acquired S3 Semiconductors, a provider of mixed-signal and RF ASICs and IP. Based in Ireland, S3 Semiconductors was founded in 1986. S3 Semiconductors will become a business unit of Adesto and will continue to operate under its current model in the $35 million deal. S3 Semiconductor's parent company, S3 Group, will continue as a separate... » read more

Does Power Verification Work?


Functional verification continues to evolve, but power verification—a somewhat new concern—remains at levels of sophistication reminiscent of functional verification 30 years ago. When will power verification catch up and what must to happen to make it possible? These are questions that the industry is still grappling with, and not everyone believes they require answers. Functional error... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A ANSYS finalized its acquisition of OPTIS. Founded in 1989, OPTIS provided software for scientific simulation of light, human vision and physics-based visualization. The acquisition boosts the company's automotive simulation portfolio with radar, lidar and camera simulation. Terms were not disclosed. IP Arm debuted the Cortex-M35P processor. Aimed at IoT applications, the IP combine... » read more

Bugs With Long Tails Can Be Costly Pests


I don’t think Van Gogh was considering high performance computing or server architecture, but he made a lot of sense when he said "great things are done by a series of small things brought together." A series of very small things can, and do, create big things: that’s the fundamental premise of long-tail marketing: Amazon, for one has built a strong business from selling millions of niche i... » read more

Tail End Latency And Server Debug


The rise of the heterogeneous multicore processor has enabled a massive increase in the ability of data centers to deliver advanced services to billions of users worldwide. But the complexity that is now possible has made the optimization of these services difficult to achieve. Providers of heterogeneous multicore SoCs have an opportunity to deliver the tools to make optimization of highly dist... » read more

When AI Goes Awry


The race is on to develop intelligent systems that can drive cars, diagnose and treat complex medical conditions, and even train other machines. The problem is that no one is quite sure how to diagnose latent or less-obvious flaws in these systems—or better yet, to prevent them from occurring in the first place. While machines can do some things very well, it's still up to humans to devise... » read more

Applying Machine Learning To Chips


The race is on to figure out how to apply analytics, data mining and machine learning across a wide swath of market segments and applications, and nowhere is this more evident than in semiconductor design and manufacturing. The key with ML/DL/AI is understanding how devices react to real events and stimuli, and how future devices can be optimized. That requires sifting through an expandi... » read more

Merging Verification With Validation


Verification and validation are two important steps in the creations of electronic systems and over time their roles, but how they play together is changing. In fact, today we are seeing a major opportunity for rethinking this aspect of the flow, which could mean the end of them as separate tasks for many of the chips being created. As with many things in this industry, however, squeezing it... » read more

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