NetSpeed has developed NocStudio, a front end optimization design tool helping architects to create SoC architecture bridging the gap with the back end, floor planning and place and route. At the chip level, NocStudio generates a cache-coherent Network-on-Chip (NoC) allowing interconnecting the various CPU, GPU or Acceleration… Read More
EDA Has a Value Capture Problem — An Outsider’s ViewBy Liyue Yan (lyan1@bu.edu) Fact 1: In the…Read More
WEBINAR: How PCIe Multistream Architecture is Enabling AI ConnectivityIn the race to power ever-larger AI models,…Read More
A Six-Minute Journey to Secure Chip Design with CaspiaHardware-level chip security has become an important topic…Read More
Lessons from the DeepChip Wars: What a Decade-old Debate Teaches Us About Tech EvolutionThe competitive landscape of hardware-assisted verification (HAV) has…Read More
Think Quantum Computing is Hype? Mastercard Begs to DisagreeJust got an opportunity to write a blog…Read More
All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful
“All models are wrong, some are useful.” This remark is attributed to the statistician George Box who used it as the section heading in a paper published in 1976.
Just for fun I looked up a few semiconductor statistics from 1976. Total capital spending was $238M in Japan and $306M in US and…that’s it, there was nobody else back then … Read More
Mongoose: The Making of Samsung’s Custom CPU Core
Samsung is seemingly ready to move to a new milestone in its brief but exciting system-on-chip (SoC) history: a custom CPU core codenamed Mongoose. It’s going to be based on ARMv8 instruction set and is expected to outperform the Exynos 7420 application processor that Samsung unveiled this year. There are some media reports… Read More
Thermal Reliability and Power Integrity for IC Design
When I designed DRAM chips at Intel back in the 1970’s we didn’t really know what the die temperature would be before taping out silicon, instead we waited for packaged parts to come back and then did our thermal measurements. IC designers today don’t have that luxury of taping out their new SoC without having … Read More
Replacing the British Museum Algorithm
In principle, one way to address variation is to do simulations at lots of PVT corners. In practice, most of this simulation is wasted since it adds no new information, and even so, important corners will get missed. This is what Sifuei Ku of Microsemi calls the British Museum Algorithm. You walk everywhere. And if you don’t walk to… Read More
FDSOI As a Multi-Node Platform
One of the main criticisms of the FDSOI technology has been that it is a one-node solution at best and is not scalable to the future. Such arguments are typically based on the “gate-length-scaling” assumptions which do not capture the past and current trends of the CMOS technology as I discussed in my earlier post. Back in the early… Read More
Apple’s Butterfly Effect?
The Butterfly Effect (chaos theory) describes how small changes to complex systems can result in large unforeseen consequences over time. The Apple Effect describes how a once struggling computer company completely disrupted a dozen different industries including semiconductors. Apple is now the largest and most influential… Read More
eSilicon Truly Puts the ‘e’ in Silicon
eSilicon have a new website. Companies update their websites regularly, so why is this news? Well, eSilicon increasingly does their business on the web. They are not like Facebook, say, where their business is entirely web-based, there is a physical business behind them. So they are more like Lyft for chips. Obviously Lyft requires… Read More
Moving up Verification to Scenario Driven Methodology
Verification complexity and volume has always been on the rise, taking significant amount of time, human, and compute resources. There are multiple techniques such as simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping, formal verification, post-silicon testing, and so on which gain prominence in different situations and at different… Read More
IoT – The Future?
I was hesitating to write on this topic as I thought I was not a subject matter expert on IoT. Nevertheless, I understood that if you’ve a penchant to understand what’s happening around you and stretch a bit to peek into the future then you can comfortably predict what’s going to be the emergent technology that’s… Read More
AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification