You may have seen a recent announcement from Mentor, a Siemens business, regarding the use of their Tessent DFT software by Ambarella for automotive applications. The announcement is a good example of how Mentor works with their customers to assure design success. On the surface the announcement comes across as a nice block and… Read More
With the number of IP blocks and complexity of designs increasing, how do you improve your TTM for debug of a test program to production? Teradyne
There is an adage that says that quality is not something that can be slapped on at the end of the design or manufacturing process. Ensuring quality requires careful thought throughout development and production. Arguably this adage is more applicable to the topic of Design for Test (DFT) than almost any other area of IC development… Read More
Hierarchy is nearly universally used in the SoC design process to help manage complexity. Dealing with flat logical or physical designs proved unworkable decades ago. However, there were a few places in the flow where flat tools continued to be used. Mentor lead the pack in the years around 1999 in helping the industry move from … Read More
It’s amazing to think that Apollo moon mission used computers that were based on magnetic core memories. Of course, CMOS memories superseded them rapidly. However, over the decades since, memory technologies have advanced significantly, in terms of density, power and new types of technologies, e.g NAND Flash. Ever since the… Read More
It’s easy to imagine that the main impetus for automotive electronics safety standards like ISO 26262 is the emergence of autonomous driving technology. However, even cars that do not offer this capability rely heavily on electronics for many critical systems. These include engine control, braking, crash sensors, and stability… Read More
Two central concepts have led to the growth of our ability to manage and implement larger and larger designs: hierarchy and higher levels of abstraction. Without these two approaches the enormous designs we are seeing in SOCs would not be possible. Hierarchy in particular allows the reuse of component blocks, such as CPU cores.… Read More
The recent growing complexity in SoC designs attributed to the increased use of embedded IP’s for more design functionalities, has imposed a pressing challenge to the post-silicon bring-up process and impacting the overall product time-to-market.
According to data from Semico Research, more than 60% of design starts contain… Read More
We have entered the age of AI specific processors, where specialized silicon is being produced to tackle the compute needs of AI. Whether they use GPUs, embedded programmable logic or specialized CPUs, many AI chips are based on parallel processing. This makes sense because of the parallel nature of AI computing. As a result, in… Read More
The automotive industry continues push the limits on how “smart” we can make our vehicles and from that, it follows as to how smart we can make the electronics in the vehicles. When I think of smart cars (and smart automotive ICs) I typically think of things like advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) that use AI and neural networks… Read More
