“Thinking Outside the Chip”

“Thinking Outside the Chip”
by Students@olemiss.edu on 04-13-2016 at 7:00 am

While pushing Moore’s Law’s boundaries in the world of 2D packaging, companies are starting to explore nontraditional approaches towards designing integrated circuit chips. 2D packaging is currently the most used method in designing chips in the industry, and while it leads in efficiency of power and performance, it lacks … Read More


Making PLM Actually Work for for IC Design

Making PLM Actually Work for for IC Design
by Tom Simon on 04-12-2016 at 12:00 pm

The topic of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) conjures up images of usage on airplanes, tanks and cars. That’s because it was developed decades ago to help make product development and delivery more efficient for big expensive manufactured products. It worked well for its intended markets by combining and managing all the … Read More


What SOC Size Growth Means for IP Management

What SOC Size Growth Means for IP Management
by Tom Simon on 03-22-2016 at 12:00 pm

Whether or not in the past you believed all the of rhetoric about exploding design complexity in SOC’s, today there can be no debate that SOC size and complexity is well beyond something that can be managed without some kind of design management system. As would be expected, development of most larger designs relies on a data management… Read More


Qualcomm Rounds Out IoT Offerings

Qualcomm Rounds Out IoT Offerings
by Patrick Moorhead on 03-22-2016 at 7:00 am

Lots of chip companies like ARM Holdings, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are spending time and effort to find a place for themselves in the IoT market because they, like I, believe in a gigantic, future market. Some companies are focusing on wearables and drones while others are looking to automotive and smart home. Qualcomm previously… Read More


Mentor Extends Verification Offering!

Mentor Extends Verification Offering!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-14-2016 at 12:00 pm

With verification consuming more and more of the design cycle and the increasingly complex industry standard interfaces that are now common place, Verification IP (VIP) is again a trending topic. Back in my IP days the age old question was: Is it better to use VIP from the IP vendor? Because you know it will work, right? Or is it better… Read More


Multi-Level Debugging Made Easy for SoC Development

Multi-Level Debugging Made Easy for SoC Development
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-01-2016 at 7:00 am

An SoC can have a collection of multiple blocks and IPs from different sources integrated together along with several other analog and digital components within a native environment. The IPs can be at different levels of abstractions; their RTL descriptions can be in different languages such as Verilog, VHDL, or SystemVerilog.… Read More


HW/SW Interfaces for Portable Stimulus

HW/SW Interfaces for Portable Stimulus
by Pawan Fangaria on 02-26-2016 at 12:00 pm

With growing size and complexity of SoC, the semiconductor community is realizing the growing pain of verification. The cost of SoC verification grows exponentially with design size. Moreover, there is no single methodology for verifying a SoC; multiple engines are used in different contexts through different verification… Read More


The (not so) Easy Life of an SOC Design Integrator

The (not so) Easy Life of an SOC Design Integrator
by Tom Simon on 02-16-2016 at 3:00 pm

How can large SOC projects effectively integrate sub blocks and IP into a stable version for release or internal development? The person responsible for integrating SOC sub blocks into a validated configuration for release has a difficult task. Usually there are many sub-blocks, each undergoing their own development. There… Read More


Submerging the Data Center

Submerging the Data Center
by Eric Esteve on 02-02-2016 at 4:00 pm

One of NetSpeed’s customers is a Tier-1 semiconductor company that develops some of the industry’s best performing and most complex system on chips (SoC) for the data center and cloud computing markets. To keep its leadership in the data center market, the company needs to produce best-in-class SoC solutions year after year. … Read More


ARM on Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?

ARM on Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?
by Scotten Jones on 01-16-2016 at 7:00 am

On Monday morning on December 7, 2016 Greg Yeric of Arm gave an excellent and wide ranging plenary talk at IEDM entitled “Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?”. You can download Greg’s slide deck here.… Read More