As RISC-V adoption accelerates across the semiconductor industry, so do the concerns about hardware security vulnerabilities that arise from its open and highly customizable nature. From hardware to firmware and operating systems, every layer of a system-on-chip (SoC) design must be scrutinized for security risks. Unlike… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Metal fill extraction: Breaking the speed-accuracy tradeoff
As semiconductor technology scales and device complexity increases, accurately modeling the parasitic effects of metal fill has become critical for circuit performance, power integrity, and reliability. Metal fill is a crucial part of the manufacturing process, ensuring uniform layer density, improving planarization,… Read More
RISC-V Virtualization and the Complexity of MMUs
In the early days of RISC-V adoption, applications were microcontroller-centric with no need for virtualization support. But horizons expanded and now RISC-V is appearing in application processors, very much needing to be able to virtualize multiple apps concurrently. Take another step forward to datacenter servers running… Read More
SNUG 2025: A Watershed Moment for EDA – Part 2
At this year’s SNUG (Synopsys Users Group) conference, Richard Ho, Head of Hardware, OpenAI, delivered the second keynote, titled “Scaling Compute for the Age of Intelligence.” In his presentation, Richard guided the audience through the transformative trends and implications of the intelligence era now unfolding before… Read More
LLMs Raise Game in Assertion Gen. Innovation in Verification
LLMs are already simplifying assertion generation but still depend on human-generated natural language prompts. Can LLMs go further, drawing semantic guidance from the RTL and domain-specific training? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO… Read More
Automotive Functional Safety (FuSa) Challenges
Modern vehicles have become quite sophisticated, like a supercomputer on wheels. They integrate a vast number of electronic components, including thousands of chips, to deliver advanced functionalities ranging from infotainment to critical safety systems. This increasing complexity necessitates a robust approach to … Read More
Scaling AI Infrastructure with Next-Gen Interconnects
At the recent IPSoC Conference in Silicon Valley, Aparna Tarde gave a talk on the importance of Next-Gen Interconnects to scale AI infrastructure. Aparna is a Sr. Technical Product Manager at Synopsys. A synthesis of the salient points from her talk follows.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally… Read More
Siemens Describes its System-Level Prototyping and Planning Cockpit
We all know semiconductor design is getting harder. Much harder when you consider the demands of AI workloads and heterogeneous integration of many chiplets in a single package. This class of system demands co-optimization across the entire design flow. For example, functional verification, thermal analysis, signal and power… Read More
Cost-Effective and Scalable: A Smarter Choice for RISC-V Development
The RISC-V ecosystem is witnessing remarkable growth, driven by increasing industry adoption and a thriving open-source community. As companies and developers seek customizable computing solutions, RISC-V has become a top choice. Providing a scalable and cost-effective ISA foundation, RISC-V enables high-performance… Read More
High-speed PCB Design Flow
High-speed PCB designs are complex, often requiring a team with design engineers, PCB designers and SI/PI engineers working together to produce a reliable product, delivered on time and within budget. Cadence has been offering PCB tools for many years, and they recently wrote a 10-page white paper on this topic, so I’ll share … Read More
Speculative Execution: Rethinking the Approach to CPU Scheduling