In the news

By Ann Steffora-Mutschler, Semiconductor Engineering

Optimizing designs for power is becoming the top design challenge in battery-driven IoT devices, boxed in by a combination of requirements such as low cost, minimum performance and functionality, as well as the need for at least some of the circuits to be always on.

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By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering

This will go down as a good year for the semiconductor industry, where new markets and innovation were both necessary and rewarded.

What surprised the industry in 2018? While business has been strong, markets are changing, product categories are shifting and clouds are forming on the horizon.

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But many people at least got a piece of this right. “We said that machine learning (ML) would present many new challenges for systems, semiconductor and EDA suppliers,” said Sergio Marchese, technical marketing manager at OneSpin Solutions. “Specific to EDA, we predicted that ML and AI would lead to an evolution in design practices and development tools. We are still in the early phases of this transition, but some changes are already clear. The statistical nature of ML means that bugs are more data-driven, leading to a new emphasis on verification of datapaths in addition to control logic. The floating-point unit formal app that we recently introduced is one example of this evolution.”

By Bryon Moyer, EE Journal

How do you know when your IC design is done? When can you declare verification victory? These are the questions that coverage is supposed to help with. When your verification has covered the entire circuit, for lack of a more precise way of articulating it, then you’re done. (At least, with that part of the verification plan…)

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By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering

“Transistors are free” was the rallying cry of the semiconductor industry during the 1990s and early 2000s. That is no longer true. The end of Dennard scaling made the simultaneous use of all the transistors troublesome, but transistors remained effectively unlimited. This led to an era where large amounts of flexibility could be built into a chip. It didn’t matter if all of it was being used; greater flexibility made the total market opportunity larger.

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By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering

How accurate does a system need to be, and what are you willing to pay for that accuracy? There are many sources of inaccuracy throughout the development flow of electronic systems, most of which involve complex tradeoffs. Inaccuracy leaves an impact on your design in ways you are not even aware of, hidden by best practices or guard-banding. EDA tools also inject some inaccuracy.

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By Ann Steffora-Mutschler, Semiconductor Engineering

Tools that are commonly used in semiconductor design are starting to be applied at the system level for assisted and autonomous vehicles, setting the stage for more complex simulated scenarios and electronic system design. Simulation is well understood for designing automotive ICs, but now it also is being used to design vehicle architectures and sensors, as well as for sensor miniaturization and for integration within a vehicle. So instead of just simulating chips, these tools are being used for modeling dynamic behavior and possible interactions of vehicles, which is much faster and more efficient than driving billions of miles to find the corner cases.

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By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Semiconductor Engineering

Verification is all about mitigating risk, and one of the growing issues alongside of increasing complexity and new architectures is coverage. The whole notion of coverage is making sure a chip will work as designed. That requires determining the effectiveness of the simulation tests that stimulate it, and its effectiveness in terms of activating structures of functional behavior and design.

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By Ed Sperling, Semiconductor Engineering

Why the addition of multiple processing elements and memories is causing so much consternation. An explosion of various types of processors and localized memories on a chip or in a package is making it much more difficult to verify and test these devices, and to sign off with confidence.

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