The electrification of cars and the growth of EVs means that more semiconductor content is being added with every new vehicle model from suppliers around the globe. There are unique concerns for automotive IP in terms of reliability, security and safety over the lifetime of the vehicle. I had the pleasure to speak with Pawini Mahajan… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
Automotive IP Certification
Why Secure Ethernet Connections?
While web browsing I constantly glance for the padlock symbol to indicate that the site is encrypting any of my form data by using the https prefix, which means that an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate is being used by the web hosting company. I have peace of mind knowing that my credit card information cannot be easily stolen… Read More
Chiplet Interconnect Challenges and Standards
For decades now I’ve watched the incredible growth of SoCs in terms of die size, transistor count, frequency and complexity. Instead of placing all of the system complexity into a single, monolithic chip, there are now compelling reasons to use a multi-chip approach, like when the maximum die size limit is reached, or it’s… Read More
Overcoming Semiconductor Supply Chain Bottlenecks
During the recent COVID pandemic it was common to read about automobile companies unable to deliver new vehicles, caused by the shortage of specific automotive chips. Even bad weather has shut down the supply of semiconductor parts to certain customers. This disruption of the IC supply chain has caused many companies that buy … Read More
Using ML for Statistical Circuit Verification
I’ve been following Solido as a start-up EDA vendor since 2005, then they were acquired by Siemens in 2017. At the recent User2User event there was a presentation by Kwonchil Kang, of Samsung Electronics on the topic, ML-enabled Statistical Circuit Verification Methodology using Solido. For high reliability circuits… Read More
What’s New with Cadence Virtuoso?
It was back in 1991 that Cadence first announced the Virtuoso product name, and here we are 32 years later and the product is alive and doing quite well. Steven Lewis from Cadence gave me an update on something new that they call Virtuoso Studio, and it’s all about custom IC design for the real world. In those 32 years we’ve… Read More
AI Assists PCB Designers
Generative AI is all the rage with systems like ChatGPT, Google Bard and DALL-E being introduced with great fanfare in the past year. The EDA industry has also been keen to adopt the trends of using AI techniques to assist IC engineers across many disciplines. Saugat Sen, Product Marketing at Cadence did a video call with me to explain… Read More
Hardware Root of Trust for Automotive Safety
Traveling by car is something that I take for granted and I just expect that my trips will be safe, yet our cars are increasingly using dozens of ECUs, SoCs and millions of lines of software code that combined together present a target for hackers or system failures. The Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL) are known by the letters:… Read More
Mapping SysML to Hardware Architecture
The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is used by systems engineers that want to specify, analyze, design, verify and validate a specific system. SysML started out as an open-source project, and it’s a subset of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Mirabilis Design has a tool called VisualSim Architect that imports your… Read More
Power Delivery Network Analysis in DRAM Design
My IC design career started out with DRAM design back in 1978, so I’ve kept an eye on the developments in this area of memory design to note the design challenges, process updates and innovations along the way. Synopsys hosted a memory technology symposium in November 2022, and I had a chance to watch a presentation from SK hynix… Read More
Intel Foundry Delivers!