Verification Tools Straining To Keep Up

By Brian Bailey - 01 Jul, 2024 - Comments: 0

Verification engineers are the unsung heroes of the semiconductor industry, but they are at a breaking point and desperately in need of modern tools and flows to deal with the rapidly increasing pressures. Verification is no longer just about ensuring that functionality is faithfully represented in an implementation. That alone is an insolvable task, but verification has taken on many new re... » read more

Shifting Left Using Model-Based Engineering

By Karen Heyman - 25 Jan, 2024 - Comments: 0

As heterogenous integration increases design complexity and forces engineers out of long-standing silos, model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is becoming essential for improving quality and reducing failures in the field. While it may seem like a new buzzword, MBSE's principles date back to the 1990s. In essence, it's a process of building models that enable early decisions, which pays off... » read more

New Design Approaches For Automotive

By Ann Mutschler - 01 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

The push toward increasing autonomy in automotive is driving new approaches in electronics development. Instead of designing individual components, the focus now is on modeling in context. The ultimate goal is to create an executable specification based on industry-accepted standards, with enough flexibility to be able to customize that spec for different customers. This is a difficult engin... » read more

Hardware-Software Co-Design Reappears

By Brian Bailey - 25 Jul, 2019 - Comments: 1

The core concepts in hardware-software co-design are getting another look, nearly two decades after this approach was first introduced and failed to catch on. What's different this time around is the growing complexity and an emphasis on architectural improvements, as well as device scaling, particularly for AI/ML applications. Software is a critical component, and the more tightly integrate... » read more

Evolution Of Verification Engineers

By Brian Bailey - 22 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the implications of having an executable specification that drives verification with Hagai Arbel, chief executive officer for VTool; Adnan Hamid, chief executive office for Breker Verification; Mark Olen, product marketing manager for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Jim Hogan, managing partner of Vista Ventures; Sharon Rosenberg, senior solutions archit... » read more

When Verification Leads

By Brian Bailey - 25 Apr, 2019 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the implications of having an executable specification that drives verification with Hagai Arbel, CEO for VTool; Adnan Hamid, CEO for Breker Verification; Mark Olen, product marketing manager for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Jim Hogan, managing partner of Vista Ventures; Sharon Rosenberg, senior solutions architect for Cadence Design Systems; and Tom... » read more

Taming Concurrency

By Brian Bailey - 17 Jan, 2019 - Comments: 2

Concurrency adds complexity for which the industry lacks appropriate tools, and the problem has grown to the point where errors can creep into designs with no easy or consistent way to detect them. In the past, when chips were essentially a single pipeline, this wasn't a problem. In fact, the early pioneers of EDA created a suitable language to describe and contain the necessary concurrency ... » read more

Can Verification Meet In The Middle?

By Brian Bailey - 30 Jun, 2016 - Comments: 0

Since the dawn of time for the EDA industry, the classic V diagram has defined the primary design flow. On the left hand side of the V, the design is progressively refined and partitioned into smaller pieces. At the bottom of the V, verification takes over and as you travel up the right-hand side of the V, verification and integration happens until the entire design has been assembled and valid... » read more

Debug: Last Bastion Of Automation

By Brian Bailey - 27 Jan, 2016 - Comments: 0

There have been a number of times when anecdotal evidence became folk law and then over time, the effort was put in to find out whether there was any truth in it. Perhaps the most famous case is the statement that verification consumes 70% of development time and resources. For years this “fact” was used in almost every verification presentation and yet nobody knew where the number had come... » read more

ROI Not There Yet For SysML

By Ann Mutschler - 24 Sep, 2015 - Comments: 3

At some point down the road in the realm of system-level design, the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) dialect of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard may drive into semiconductor design. So far, however, a return on investment has not been established for its use. SysML is defined as a general-purpose visual modeling language for systems engineering applications, and it supports the... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.