All aspects of semiconductor design and manufacturing require collaboration across a global ecosystem. As complexity increases, so does the importance of good collaboration. This is especially true for advanced package design. Thanks to the movement to multi-die design, package development has become an incredibly difficult… Read More
Fully Automating Chip Design
Design Productivity Gap
Twenty-five years ago, SEMATECH first alerted the world to a concern known as the design productivity gap: the observation that the ability to manufacture complex chips had started outpacing the capability of designers to create them by more than a factor of two. This concern was subsequently reiterated… Read More
2024 Starts Slow, But Primed for Growth
The global semiconductor market in 1Q 2024 was $137.7 billion, according to WSTS. 1Q 2024 was down 5.7% from 4Q 2023 and up 15.2% from a year ago. The first quarter of the year is typically down seasonally from the fourth quarter of the prior year. However, the 1Q 2024 decline of 5.7% was worse than expected.
Major semiconductor companies… Read More
The Git Dilemma: Is Version Control Enough for Semiconductor Success?
Git is a version control system that saves every change made to files. It offers powerful tools for managing these changes. This makes Git ideal for software development, as it lets you keep all project files in one place.
Software has grown in complexity, necessitating more collaboration among engineers across various time zones.… Read More
Mastering Copper TSV Fill Part 1 of 3
Establishing void-free fill of high aspect ratio TSVs, capped by a thin and uniform bulk layer optimized for removal by CMP, means fully optimizing each of a series of critical phases. As we will see in this 3-part series, the conditions governing outcomes for each phase vary greatly, and the complexity of interacting factors means… Read More
From System Design to Drug Design. The Rationale
I’m guessing that more than a few people were mystified (maybe still are) when Cadence acquired OpenEye Scientific, a company known for computational molecular design aimed at medical drug/therapeutics discovery. What could EDA, even SDA (system design automation), and drug discovery possibly have in common? More than you… Read More
New Tool that Synthesizes Python to RTL for AI Neural Network Code
AI and ML techniques are popular topics, yet there are considerable challenges to those that want to design and build an AI accelerator for inferencing, as you need a team that understands how to model a neural network in a language like Python, turn that model into RTL, then verify that your RTL matches Python. Researchers from CERN,… Read More
S2C and Sirius Wireless Collaborate on Wi-Fi 7 RF IP Verification System
Sirius Wireless partnered with FPGA prototyping expert S2C to develop the Wi-Fi 7 RF IP Verification System, enhancing working efficiency and accelerating time-to-market for clients.
Wi-Fi 7 is the latest Wi-Fi technology, with speeds of up to 30Gbps, approximately three times the peak performance of Wi-Fi 6. This enhanced… Read More
An open letter regarding Cyber Resilience of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure
Codasip announced a commercially available RISC-V processor with CHERI for license in October of 2023 and is demonstrating technology for IP provenance.
Dear Members of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee,
Let me start by applauding your hearing on 24 April 2024, and in particular the evidence of Professor John… Read More
How to Find and Fix Soft Reset Metastability
Most of us are familiar with the metastability problems that can be caused by clock domain crossings (CDC). Early static analysis techniques can flag these kinds of issues to ensure there are no surprises later. I spent quite a bit of time at Atrenta, the SpyGlass company, so I am very familiar with these challenges. Due to the demands… Read More
CES 2025 and all things Cycling