Power Issues Causing More Respins At 7nm And Below

By Brian Bailey - 26 Jan, 2023 - Comments: 0

Power consumption has been a major design consideration for some time, but it is far from being a solved issue. In fact, an increasing number of designs have a plethora of power-related problems, and those problems are getting worse in new chip designs. Many designs today are power-limited — or perhaps more accurately stated, thermal-limited. A chip only can consume as much power as it is ... » read more

Power Domain Implementation Challenges Escalate

By Ann Mutschler - 20 Jun, 2022 - Comments: 0

The number power domains is rising as chip architects build finer-grained control into chips and systems, adding significantly to the complexity of the overall design effort. Different power domains are an essential ingredient in partitioning of different functions. This approach allows different chips in a package, and different blocks in an SoC, to continue running with just enough power t... » read more

The Challenges Of Incremental Verification

By Brian Bailey - 28 Apr, 2022 - Comments: 1

Verification consumes more time and resources than design, and yet little headway is being made to optimize it. The reasons are complex, and there are more questions than there are answers. For example, what is the minimum verification required to gain confidence in a design change? How can you minimize the cost of finding out that the change was bad, or that it had unintended consequences? ... » read more

Power-Aware Test: Addressing Power Challenges In DFT And Test

By Rahul Singhal - 10 Aug, 2021 - Comments: 0

Integrated circuit (IC) sizes continue to grow as they meet the compute requirements of cutting-edge applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous driving, and data centers. As design sizes increase, the total power consumption of the chip also increases. While process node scaling reduces a transistor’s size and its operating-voltage, power scaling has not kept up with the si... » read more

Lower Power Chips: What To Watch Out For

By Ann Mutschler - 08 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

Low-power design in advanced nodes and advanced packaging is becoming a multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary challenge, where a long list of issues need to be solved both individually and in the context of other issues. With each new leading-edge process node, and with increasingly dense packaging, the potential for problematic interactions is growing. That, in turn, can lead to poor yield, cos... » read more

Primary, Anonymous, or What?

By Siemens EDA - 09 Jun, 2021 - Comments: 0

Top level primary I/Os remain mysterious in the verification world, specifically when you consider UPF-based low power designs. In real silicon, they are usually driven by off-chip supplies; however, verification complications are multifold for RTL and gate level simulations of them. This paper studies the “simulation-impacting” features of design top IOs and the effect of each feature on v... » read more

The Many Flavors Of UPF: Which Is Right For Your Design?

By Madhur Bhargava - 11 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 0

Energy efficient electronic systems require sophisticated power management architectures that present difficult low-power verification challenges. Accellera introduced the Unified Power Format (UPF) standard in 2007 to help engineers deal with these complex issues. To keep pace with the growing complexity of low-power designs, the UPF standard has itself continued to evolve through the relea... » read more

Customizing Low-Power Platforms Using UPF Dynamic Properties

By Progyna Khondkar - 12 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

Low power design and verification engineers need a way to continuously probe various dynamic properties of UPF objects in order to monitor the current state of a verification strategy and utilize that information to develop custom low-power verification environments. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a reliable, formalized way to do this. Since availability of the dynamic properties of unif... » read more

Probing UPF Dynamic Objects

By Mentor, a Siemens Business - 11 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

This paper presents a new low-power verification methodology that makes it possible to continuously monitor the dynamic properties of UPF objects and utilize the information to develop custom low-power verification environments. Based on UPF information model concepts, it allows querying of any dynamic properties of UPF objects through a Tcl API and passing object information on to appropriatel... » read more

Open-Source Verification

By Brian Bailey - 30 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 1

Ask different people what open-source verification means and you will get a host of different answers. They range from the verification of open-source hardware, to providing an open-source verification infrastructure, to providing open-source stream generators or reference models, to open-source simulators and formal verification engines. Verification is about reducing risk. "Verification is... » 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

New AI Processors Architectures Balance Speed With Efficiency

Hot Chips 24: Large language models ratchet up pressure for sustainable computing and heterogeneous integration; data management becomes key differentiator.