One of the reasons I founded SemiWiki nine years ago was the lack of EDA, IP and Foundry content in the media. The problem is that unless you work in the industry it is very difficult to write about it in competent technical detail. Most media outlets only know what vendors tell them which is how the semiconductor industry worked before… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Mentor’s Questa verification tools now run on 64-bit ARM based servers
The server market has been undergoing changes in the last few years. The traditional go-to for server processors had been x86 based chips from Intel or AMD. However, if you go on Amazon AWS looking for EC2 instances, you will see the “A1” instance type, which is an ARM based instance. This is not what you might think at first. The A1 instance… Read More
Functional Safety ARC Processor IP will speed automotive system design
In the automotive space you can’t even get out of the starting gate without Functional Safety (FS). All electronic system that go into cars must have ISO 26262 certification. However, this is not something you slap on after the fact. From the ground up the requirements for ISO 26262 must be considered and the proper processes must… Read More
WEBINAR: Generating and Measuring IP Security Threat Levels For Your SoCs
IPs have an attack surface that indicates how they can be compromised in real world scenarios. Some portions of the attack surfaces are well known, others are discovered during analysis, testing or out in the field. SoCs that use large collections of IPs need a systematic and reliable way to determine the various security vulnerabilities… Read More
Design Perspectives on Intermittent Faults
Bugs are an inescapable reality in any but the most trivial designs and usually trace back to very deterministic causes – a misunderstanding of the intended spec or an incompletely thought-through implementation of some feature, either way leading to reliably reproducible failure under the right circumstances. You run diagnostics,… Read More
5G Deployments – The Analysis Requirements are Ginormous
The introduction of 5G communications support offers tremendous potential across a broad spectrum of applications (no pun intended). 5G is indeed quite encompassing, across a wide range of frequencies – the figure below illustrates the common terminology used, from low-band, mid-band (“sub 6G”), and high-band (“mmWave”)… Read More
Workflow Automation Applied to IP Lifecycle Management
I often blog about a specific EDA tool, or an IP block, but the way that SoC design teams approach their designs and then use tools and IP can either be a manual, ad-hoc process, or part of something that is well-documented, following a design methodology. Back in the 1980’s while at Intel our team first created a design methodology… Read More
Synopsys and Infineon prepare for expanding AI use in automotive applications
We all know that cars are using processors for many tasks, but it is easy to fail to comprehend just how many there are in a typical modern car. Browsing through the Infineon AURIX automotive processor application guide, you can start to see just how pervasive processors are. The AURIX processors are specifically designed for automotive… Read More
AI Hardware Summit, Report #3: Enabling On-Device Intelligence
This is the third and final blog I have written about the recent AI Hardware Summit held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Day 1 of the conference was more about solutions in the data center, whereas Day 2 was primarily around solutions at the Edge. This presentation from Day 2 was given by Dr. Thomas Anderson, Head,… Read More
Debugging SoCs at the RTL, Gate and SPICE Netlist Levels
Debugging an IC is never much fun because of all the file formats used, the levels of hierarchy and just the sheer design size, so when an EDA tool comes around that allows me to get my debugging done quicker, then I take notice and give it a look. I was already familiar with debugging SPICE netlists using a tool called SPICEVision Pro,… Read More


ASML High-NA EUV is Not Ready for High-Volume Production