Semiconductor IP design re-use has enabled the relentless growth in complexity of SoC and chiplet-based systems over the years, and with IP reuse comes many unique challenges. Fabless design companies use IP provided by a vibrant ecosystem of IP suppliers and foundries, plus internal re-use in the quest to get to market more … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Qualcomm Insights into Unreachability Analysis
Unreachability (UNR) analysis, finding and definitively proving that certain states in a design cannot possibly be covered in testing, should be a wildly popular component in all verification plans. When the coverage needle stubbornly refuses to move, where should you focus testing creativity while avoiding provably untestable… Read More
TSMC N3E is ready for designs, thanks to IP from Synopsys
TSMC has been offering foundry services since 1987, and their first 3nm node was called N3 and debuted in 2022; now they have an enhanced 3nm node dubbed N3E that has launched. Every new node then requires IP that is carefully designed, characterized and validated in silicon to ensure that the IP specifications are being met and … Read More
Synopsys Panel Updates on the State of Multi-Die Systems
Synopsys recently hosted a cross-industry panel on the state of multi-die systems which I found interesting not least for its relevance to the rapid acceleration in AI-centric hardware. More on that below. Panelists, all with significant roles in multi-die systems, were Shekhar Kapoor (Senior Director of Product Management,… Read More
Placement and Clocks for HPC
You are probably familiar with the acronym PPA, which stands for Power/Performance/Area. Sometimes it is PPAC, where C is for cost, since there is more to cost than just area. For example, did you know that adding an additional metal layer to a chip dramatically increases the cost, sometimes by millions of dollars? It requires a … Read More
Synopsys – TSMC Collaboration Unleashes Innovation for TSMC OIP Ecosystem
As the focal point of the TSMC OIP ecosystem, TSMC has been driving important initiatives over the last few years to bring multi-die systems to the mainstream. As the world is moving quickly toward Generative AI technology and AI-based systems, multi-die and chiplet-based implementations are becoming essential. TSMC recently… Read More
The Quest for Bugs: “Verification is a Data Problem!”
Verification Data Analytics
Hardware Verification is a highly data-intensive or data-heavy problem. Verification Engineers recognise this and spend much of their time dealing with large and complex datasets arising from verification processes.
In “The Dilemmas of Hardware Verification” we explored the key challenges … Read More
Transformers Transforming the Field of Computer Vision
Over the last few years, transformers have been fundamentally changing the nature of deep learning models, revolutionizing the field of artificial intelligence. Transformers introduce an attention mechanism that allows models to weigh the importance of different elements in an input sequence. Unlike traditional deep learning… Read More
Lowering the DFT Cost for Large SoCs with a Novel Test Point Exploration & Implementation Methodology
With the increasing on-chip integration capabilities, large scale electronic systems can be integrated into a single System-on-Chip or SoC. New manufacturing test challenges are raised for more advanced technology nodes where both quality and cost during testing are affected. A typical parameter is test coverage which impacts… Read More
AI for the design of Custom, Analog Mixed-Signal ICs
Custom and Analog-Mixed Signal (AMS) IC design are used when the highest performance is required, and using digital standard cells just won’t meet the requirements. Manually sizing schematics, doing IC layout, extracting parasitics, then measuring the performance only to go back and continue iterating is a long, tedious… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography