Machine Learning’s Limits (Part 1)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Rob Aitken, an Arm fellow; Raik Brinkmann, CEO of OneSpin Solutions; Patrick Soheili, vice president of business and corporate development at eSilicon; and Chris Rowen, CEO of Babblelabs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are we with machine learning? What problems still have to be resolved? Aitken: We're in a state where thi... » read more

Welcome Verification 3.0


Leave it to Jim Hogan, managing partner of Vista Ventures, to look further out at the changing horizon of verification than the rest of us and to make sense of it in what he calls Verification 3.0. In his executive summary, he outlined the significant advancements in functional verification over the past 20 years, such as hybrid verification platforms in Verification 1.0 and hardware/software c... » read more

FPGAs Becoming More SoC-Like


FPGAs are blinged-out rockstars compared to their former selves. No longer just a collection of look-up tables (LUTs) and registers, FPGAs have moved well beyond into now being architectures for system exploration and vehicles for proving a design architecture for future ASICs. This family of devices now includes everything from basic programmable logic all the way up to complex SoC devices.... » read more

Commoditizing Constraints


Preparing articles for Semiconductor Engineering involves talking to a lot of people and then trying to fit their statements together in a way that is logical and fair. Sometimes a subject will come up in one of these calls that is not really on topic, but is still interesting. One such incident happened this week while doing research for the Verification 3.0 article. The topic was constrain... » read more

Making Declarative Modeling Modular: Portable Stimulus Introduces Dynamic Constraints


Naturally, Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) supports the powerful capabilities of advanced verification techniques that are well-known in the industry today, including object-oriented composition and constrained-random stimulus. But the PSS also supports a new constraint capability, called dynamic constraints. Dynamic constraints support the critical mission of the PSS by makin... » read more

Analog Migration Equals Redesign


Analog design has never been easy. Engineers can spend their entire careers focused just on phase-locked loops (PLLs), because to get them right the functionality of circuits need to be understood in depth, including how they respond across different process corners and different manufacturing processes. In the finFET era, those challenges have only intensified for analog circuits. Reuse, fo... » read more

Tech Talk: Traceability In Functional Safety


Dominik Strasser, vice president of engineering at OneSpin Solutions, talks about the impact of functional safety regulations on liability and traceability in automotive, rail, industrial, nuclear and machinery applications. https://youtu.be/2jWnId8jQJg » read more

Choosing A Format For The Portable Stimulus Specification


The Accellera Systems Initiative is currently defining a Portable Stimulus Specification (PSS) standard for verification models that can be used to generate appropriate tests for all levels and platforms automatically. The current draft of the standard includes two alternative input formats for these models. This paper examines the merits and challenges of both formats. To read more, click h... » read more

EDA In The Cloud (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the migration of EDA tools into the Cloud with Arvind Vel, director of product management at ANSYS; Michal Siwinski, vice president of product management at Cadence; Richard Paw, product marketing manager at DellEMC, Gordon Allan, product manager at Mentor, a Siemens Business; Doug Letcher, president and CEO of Metrics, Tom Anderson, technical marke... » read more

How To Build Functional Safety Into Your Design From The Start


The focus on functional safety IP is rapidly growing and we’re seeing this growth not just in automotive but in many other markets including, avionics, medical, industrial and railways, where systems need to efficiently identify and mitigate the occurrences of faults, and where more confidence is required with respect to the design practises employed for the development of IP. Currently, m... » read more

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