SoC test challenges arise due to the complexity and diversity of the functional blocks integrated into the chip. As SoCs become more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to access all of the functional blocks within the chip for testing. SoCs also can contain billions of transistors, making it extremely time-consuming… Read More
Performance, Power and Area (PPA) metrics are the driving force in the semiconductor market and impact all electronic products that are developed. PPA tradeoff decisions are not engineering decisions, but rather business decisions made by product companies as they decide to enter target end markets. As such, the sooner a company… Read More
As digital transmission speeds increase, designers use various techniques to improve the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver output. One such technique is the Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE) scheme, commonly used in high-speed Serializer-Deserializer (SerDes) circuits to mitigate the effects of channel noise and … Read More
You don’t often hear about the inner workings of EDA tools and flows – the marketing guys much prefer telling us about all the exciting things their tools can do rather than the internal plumbing. But this matters for making design flows – and building these has largely been left to the users to sort out. That’s an increasing challenge… Read More
The last thing you want when taping out a design is to hit large numbers of violations in signoff checks that could have been flushed out and resolved in earlier flow iterations. For implementation flows (floorplanning, synthesis, place and route), it’s usual to do a lot of flow flushing work early in the design cycle and iteratively… Read More
As more AI applications turn to edge computing to reduce latencies, the need for more computational performance at the edge continues to increase. However, commodity compute engines don’t have enough compute power or are too power-hungry to meet the needs of edge systems. Thus, when designing AI accelerators for the edge, Joe… Read More
This will be the year of the semiconductor foundry ecosystem, absolutely. Right in between the Samsung SAFE Forum and the TSMC OIP Open Ecosystem Forum, Intel Foundry Services (IFS) just announced a United States Military, Aerospace, and Government (USMAG) Alliance.
Brilliant move, of course, due to the US Government now being… Read More
An earlier blog started with the topic of delivering 3D IC innovations faster. The blog covered the following foundational enablers for successful heterogeneous 3D IC implementation.
In a two-part series, Lauro Rizzatti examines why three kinds of hardware-assisted verification engines are a must have for today’s semiconductor designs. To do so, he interviewed Siemens EDA’s Vijay Chobisa and Juergen Jaeger to learn more about the Veloce hardware-assisted verification systems.
What follows is part one,… Read More
3D IC technology development started many years ago well before the slowing down of Moore’s law benefits became a topic of discussion. The technology was originally leveraged for stacking functional blocks with high-bandwidth buses between them. Memory manufacturers and other IDMs were the ones to typically leverage this … Read More
