RISC-V Gaining Traction


Part 1: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss where and why RISC-V is doing well, with Zdenek Prikryl, CTO of Codasip; Helena Handschuh, a Rambus Security Technologies fellow; Louie De Luna, director of marketing at Aldec; Shubhodeep Roy Choudhury, CEO of Valtrix Systems; and Bipul Talukdar, North America director of applications engineering at SmartDV. What follows are excerpt of that ... » read more

EDA On Board With New Package Options


A groundswell of activity around multi-die integration and advanced packaging is pushing EDA companies to develop integration strategies that speed up time to sign-off, increase confidence that a design will work as expected, while still leaving enough room for highly customized solutions. Challenges range from how to architect a design, how to explore the best options and configurations, ho... » read more

Open-Source Hardware Momentum Builds


Open-source hardware continues to gain ground, spearheaded by RISC-V — despite the fact that this processor technology is neither free nor simple to use. Nevertheless, the open-source hardware movement has established a solid foothold after multiple prior forays that yielded only limited success, even for processors. With demand for more customized hardware, and a growing field of startups... » read more

Over-Design, Under-Design Impacts Verification


Designing a complex chip today and getting it out the door on schedule and within budget — while including all of the necessary and anticipated features and standards — is forcing engineering teams to make more tradeoffs than in the past, and those tradeoffs now are occurring throughout the flow. In an ideal system design flow, design teams will have done early, pre-design analysis to se... » read more

Configuring Processors In The Field


The convergence of two technologies, extensible processors and embedded FPGAs, is enabling the creation of processors that can be dynamically configured in the field. But it's not clear if there is a need for them or how difficult would it be to program them. This remains an open question even though there is evidence of its usefulness in the past and new products are expected to reach the mark... » read more

Practical Processor Verification


Custom processors are making a resurgence, spurred on by the early success of the RISC-V ISA and the ecosystem that is rapidly building around it. But this shift is amid questions about whether processor verification has become a lost art. Years ago custom processors were common. But as the market consolidated around a handful of companies, so did the tools and expertise needed to develop th... » read more

Using Processor Trace At The System Level


The race to process more data faster using less power is creating a series of debug challenges at the system level, where developers need to be able to trace interactions across multiple and often heterogeneous processing elements that may function independently of each other. In general, trace is a hardware debug feature that allows the run-time behavior of IP to be monitored. More specific... » read more

Why It’s So Hard To Create New Processors


The introduction, and initial success, of the RISC-V processor ISA has reignited interest in the design of custom processors, but the industry is now grappling with how to verify them. The expertise and tools that were once in the market have been consolidated into the hands of the few companies that have been shipping processor chips or IP cores over the past 20 years. Verification of a pro... » read more

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