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Instead of tweaking existing designs, VSORA built an AI chip from scratch to fix the real bottleneck: moving data fast enough to keep the math circuits busy.
There’s a version of the AI hardware story that everyone in the chip industry has heard a hundred times. A startup raises money on a clever chip design, promises to topple… Read More
Preamble
Hardware-assisted verification (HAV) platforms, including hardware emulators and FPGA-based prototyping systems, are the two dominant methodologies for validating long workloads on complex System-on-Chip (SoC) designs before tape-out. HAV sits within a broader continuum of verification engines: simulation… Read More
In the early 1980s, when computer-aided engineering (CAE), the precursor to modern electronic design automation (EDA), was just taking shape, my professional trajectory shifted in a way that would prove foundational. I joined Teradyne, the Boston-based leader in automated test equipment (ATE), and I encountered for the first… Read More
For the past decade, the semiconductor industry has been moving in one direction: shift-left, specifically, shifting more validation into the pre-silicon phase. The idea was straightforward: if software ultimately determines how a system behaves, then software should become a primary vehicle for verification.
The industry… Read More
Hardware emulation arose as a necessity out of the needs of the eighties. By the mid-1980s, semiconductor designs had outgrown the practical limits of gate-level simulation. Gate-level simulation delivered accuracy, but at glacial pace; silicon prototypes performed at real-speed but arrived far too late. The industry needed… Read More
FPGA prototyping and hardware emulation originated from two independent demands that emerged at roughly the same time, namely, the necessity to implement digital designs in reconfigurable hardware. This was conceivable given the newly introduced field programmable gate array (FPGA) device.
Yet from the very beginning they… Read More
A recent analysis highlighted by MIT Technology Review puts the energy cost of generative AI into stark perspective. Generating a simple text response from Llama 3.1-405B—a model with 405 billion parameters, the adjustable “knobs” that enable prediction—requires on average 3,353 joules, nearly 1 watt-hour (Wh). Once cooling… Read More
The 40-Year Evolution of Hardware-Assisted Verification — From In-Circuit Emulation to AI-Era Full-Stack Validation
For more than a decade, Hardware-Assisted Verification platforms have been the centerpiece of the verification toolbox. Today, no serious semiconductor program reaches tapeout without emulation or FPGA-prototyping… Read More
Sandra Rivera, a Silicon Valley veteran who is the former CEO of Altera, an Intel FPGA spinout, and long-time Intel executive, recently became Chair of the Board of Directors of Paris-based VSORA. VSORA, a technology leader redefining AI inference for next-generation data centers, cloud infrastructure and edge, is focused … Read More
The competitive landscape of hardware-assisted verification (HAV) has evolved dramatically over the past decade. The strategic drivers that once defined the market have shifted in step with the rapidly changing dynamics of semiconductor design.
Design complexity has soared, with modern SoCs now integrating tens of billions… Read More
ASML Has High-NA and Chipmakers Can’t Say No