Analog Fault Simulation


Anand Thiruvengadam, senior staff product marketing manager at Synopsys, drills down into the need for fault simulation in analog circuits in automotive designs. » read more

Evolution Of Verification Engineers


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

In-Chip Monitoring Becoming Essential Below 10nm


Rising systemic complexity and more potential interactions in heterogeneous designs is making it much more difficult to ensure a chip, or even a block within a chip, will functioning properly without actually monitoring that behavior in real-time. Continuous and sporadic monitoring have been creeping into designs for the past couple of decades. But it hasn’t always been clear how effective... » read more

Incremental System Verification


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

Chiplet Momentum Builds, Despite Tradeoffs


Chip design is a series of tradeoffs. Some are technical, others are related to cost, competitive features or legal restrictions. But with the nascent 'chiplet' market, many of the established balance points are significantly altered, depending on market segments and ecosystem readiness. Chiplets provide an alternative mechanism for integrating intellectual property (IP) blocks into a semico... » read more

ASIC/IC Trends With A Focus On Factors Of Silicon Success


“The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” ― Aristotle, 4th C. BC When Aristotle uttered this humble aphorism, he wasn’t telling us to throw up our hands and not bother with learning. He was encouraging us to continue digging deeper, to get answers and ask questions of those answers — that the thrills and rewards of study are truly without end. This is a big part of ou... » read more

Selecting A Portable Stimulus Application Focal Point


The "axes of reuse" are a powerful way to identify a focal point for your application of Portable Stimulus. Picking a focal point helps to identify needed resources and identify the gap between what is needed and what already exists in your organization. Picking an initial focal point for applying Portable Stimulus doesn’t preclude expanding the application of Portable Stimulus in the future.... » read more

Three Tools Help Put Safe Vehicles On The Road


By Richard Pugh and Gabriele Pulini As the ultimate systems-of-systems, automated vehicles present an enormous verification task, requiring verification of complex sensing, computing, and actuating functions. This can be accomplished only by virtualizing the entire system: the vehicle and the environment it moves through. It also requires a combination of realistic scenario modeling, hard... » read more

Defining Verification


There was a time when the notion of rigorous verification was seen as being unnecessary and even wasteful. I can remember early in my career working on flight control computers. We did no functional verification and created no models. We prototyped it and ran some engineering tests through it, primarily to structurally verify the system. We did not test the functionality of the system – that ... » read more

Moving Beyond Geometries: Context-Aware Verification Improves Design Quality And Reliability


Context-aware checks integrate physical and electrical information to evaluate a wide range of design conditions, from advanced design rule compliance, to circuit and reliability verification, to design optimization and finishing. Automated context-aware checking provides designers with actionable results that improve both debugging efficiency and verification precision. Introduction Many p... » read more

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