Get Ready For Integrated Silicon Photonics


Long-haul communications and data centers are huge buyers of photonics components, and that is leading to rapid advances in the technology and opening new markets and opportunities. The industry has to adapt to meet the demands being placed on it and solve the bottlenecks in the design, development and fabrication of integrated silicon photonics. "Look at the networking bandwidth used across... » read more

New Market Drivers


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changing market dynamics with Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22926" e_name="Achronix"]; Apurva Kalia, vice president of R&D in the System and Verification group of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Mohammed Kassem, CTO for [getentity id="22910" comment="efabless"]; Matthew Ballance, product engineer and techn... » read more

Going Deep Or Broad With Formal?


Whether to apply [getkc id="33" comment="formal verification"] technology to semiconductor design broadly or deeply is a tough question. It hinges on what is the best way to achieve maximum ROI. Do you want to identify hard to find bugs, and get a certain level of confidence about a block? Where should the effort be placed? Is it by going deep, meaning a team of specialists or experts must b... » read more

Abstracting Abstracter Abstractions In Functional Verification


I heard a clear three-part message during DVCon at the end of February: verification engineers must abstractly embrace the abstract idea of abstracting abstract abstraction through higher levels of abstraction; we overuse the word abstract to emphasize the value of whatever verification technique we happen to be talking about; and the key to new abstractions is using Portable Stimulu... » read more

Verification And Validation Brothers


At DVCon this year, Doug Amos took the stage for the [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"] sponsored lunch presentation. For those of you who were there but decided to skip the lunch, expecting the traditional forced sales pitch, you made a mistake. Amos is one of those rare people who know how to inject humor, teaching and marketing into a single presentation such that the... » read more

Simplifying SystemVerilog Functional Coverage


Let’s say you have a block you need to verify. How do you know that the stimulus you are about to use is exhaustive enough and that you have covered the necessary scenarios/situations to prove it is working correctly? This is where functional coverage comes in. SystemVerilog’s functional coverage constructs allow you to quantify the completeness of your stimulus by recording the values that... » read more

Can Big Data Help Coverage Closure?


Semiconductor designs are a combination of very large numbers and very small numbers. There is a large numbers of transistors at very small sizes, and databases are often large. The chip industry has been looking at [getkc id="305" kc_name="machine learning"] to effectively manage some of this data, but so far datasets have not been properly tagged across the industry and there is a reluctan... » read more

Tech Talk: Faster Simulation


Cadence’s Adam Sherer talks about how to speed up simulation in complex multi-core designs. https://youtu.be/lDgMwU5KN7U » read more

Merging Verification With Validation


Verification and validation are two important steps in the creations of electronic systems and over time their roles, but how they play together is changing. In fact, today we are seeing a major opportunity for rethinking this aspect of the flow, which could mean the end of them as separate tasks for many of the chips being created. As with many things in this industry, however, squeezing it... » read more

DO-254: Increasing Verification Coverage By Test


Verification coverage by test is essential to satisfying both the objectives of DO-254 and interpretation in FAA Oder 8110.105. However, verification of requirements by test during final board testing is challenging and time-consuming in most cases. This white paper explains the reasons behind these challenges and provides recommendations for how to overcome them. The recommendations center ... » read more

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