PCI-SIG has held to doubling PCIe’s data rate with each revision of the specification. The consortium of 800 companies, with its board consisting of Agilent, AMD, Dell, HP, Intel, Synopsys, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, is continuing this trend with the PCIe 6.0 specification which calls for a transfer rate of 64 GT/s. PCI-SIG released… Read More
We have come a long way from the days of limited and manageable characterization databases with fewer views and smaller library sizes. The technologies we are headed towards pushing characterization to its limits with special modeling for variation, aging and reliability all on a single process, voltage and temperature (PVT).… Read More
Design verification (DV) is still one of the biggest challenges in the ASIC based product world. In last two decades, we have seen many changes in terms of HVLs and methodologies used for design verification. System Verilog is the most popular HVL these days and UVM is the most popular verification methodology.
Even after such an… Read More
What do genome sequencing, engineering modeling and simulation, and big data analytics have in common? They’re all bandwidth-hungry applications with complex data workloads. High-performance computing (HPC) systems deliver the parallel processing capabilities to generate detailed and valuable insights from these applications.
When I started in EDA the big three were Daisy, Mentor and Valid (DMV as we called them). Then came Synopsys in 1986 followed by Cadence, which was a clever merger between ECAD (Dracula DRC) and Solomon Design. Daisy and Valid were pushed aside and then there were, “Three dogs hovering over one bowl of dog food, not a pretty site.”… Read More
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms thirsting for higher performance per watt have driven the development of specific hardware design techniques, including in-memory computing, for system-on-chip (SoC) designs. In-memory computing has predominantly been publicly seen in semiconductor startups looking to disrupt… Read More
IDC has forecasted that over the next five years, the Global Datasphere — the amount of data that’s created, transferred over the network and stored each year — will increase by over 3X to 175 zettabytes (Figure 1). Much of this is driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), video applications (including video streaming,… Read More
Despite sounding like a minor enhancement version for USB, USB 3.2 introduces many important changes for the USB specification. To see where USB has come from and where it is going, it is essential to look at what is found in USB 3.2. The other salient point is that now the Type-C connector has split out from the underlying USB specification… Read More
Effective and efficient functional verification is one of the biggest hurdles for today’s large and complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The goal is to verify as close as possible to 100% of the design’s specified functionality before committing to the long and expensive tape-out process for application-specific integrated… Read More
Let’s face it, AI is everywhere. From the cloud to the edge to your pocket, there is more and more embedded intelligence fueling efficiency and features. It’s sometimes hard to discern where human interaction ends, and machine interaction begins. The technology that underlies all this is quite complex and daunting to understand.… Read More
