At a recent VLSI-D panel, industry leaders explored one of the most pressing topics in silicon design today — the intersection of AI-powered EDA, which is revolutionizing chip design for tomorrow.Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise, questioned the panelists on the role of AI in chip design, optimizing PPA, validation and verification. While the panel explored the role of AI in design implemen...» read more
The semiconductor industry stands at a critical juncture. First-time silicon success rates have reached all-time lows, while design complexity continues to grow exponentially. System-on-chip designs now integrate billions of transistors, multiple processor cores, complex memory hierarchies, and sophisticated interconnect fabrics. In this environment, the stakes for verification accuracy have ne...» read more
When constrained random test pattern generation became the de facto way to verify designs, reference models became necessary to check that a design was producing the correct output. These were often distributed across several models, such as checkers, scoreboards and assertions.Another model that had to be created was the coverage model. It was required because you had to know if a generate...» read more
Researchers at UCSD and Columbia University published "ChipBench: A Next-Step Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Performance in AI-Aided Chip Design."Abstract"While Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in hardware engineering, current benchmarks suffer from saturation and limited task diversity, failing to reflect LLMs' performance in real industrial workflows. To address t...» read more
Key Takeaways Architectural conformance and implementation verification are necessary but different for RISC-V designs, yet few verification engineers have experience on the conformance side. While RISC-V enables flexibility, there is a potential for ecosystem fragmentation. It is mathematically impossible to test every instruction combination, so engineers are moving beyond just "bl...» read more
Key Takeaways Design for test takes on new urgency in complex multi-die assemblies, where it can be used to minimize downstream errors and the cost of fixing them. DFT needs to be increasingly detailed due to more connections and the inability to access some components. DFT strategies need to be developed earlier and may require multiple testing approaches.Multi-die assembl...» read more
The heterogeneous integration of multiple chiplets in a single packaging platform is critical for many high performance compute segemnts such as AI, Hyperscalers, Cloud datacenters, Neural processors and even autonomous vehicles. With the quantity of chiplets commonly exceeding double-digit numbers. Add to that the increasing usage of high-speed, low power and low latency high-bandwidth-memory ...» read more
Verification of modern System on Chip (SoC) designs involve many components. Hardware Description Languages (VHDL, System Verilog), Unified Power Format (UPF), Software Languages (C#/C++), Interconnect standards (IP-XACT, AMBA), and specialty purpose-built layers such as the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) and System Verilog Assertions (SVA). This deck explores using Arteris SoC Integr...» read more
Over the past several decades studying verification practices across the semiconductor industry, I’ve watched assumptions that once held up remarkably well begin to strain under the weight of modern system complexity. This is not a loss of engineering rigor. It is the result of systems that no longer conform to the boundaries earlier design models depended on.For much of the industry’s ...» read more
High-level synthesis (HLS) is a design flow in which design intent is described at a higher level of abstraction than RTL, such as in SystemC/C++ or MATLAB. HLS tools are expected to synthesize this code to RTL, which can be input to the traditional RTL downstream flow (RTL/GDS). Formally checking generated RTL can be difficult to analyze, as errors cannot be correlated to the HLS source code. ...» read more
Workflows and the addition of new capabilities are happening much faster than with previous technologies, and new grads may be vital in that transition.
Workflows and the addition of new capabilities are happening much faster than with previous technologies, and new grads may be vital in that transition.
Companies and governments invested heavily in onshoring fabs and facilities over the past 12 months as tariffs threatened to upset the global supply chain.
Memory chip shortages prompt price increases; Israeli chip foundry; 2 acquisitions; Baidu's AI chips; IBM's new quantum processor; GF's GaN push; 3D NAND scaling boosters; U.S. policy recommendations; +$500M in fundings; SiPho and SiGe capacity; EV joint venture.
Growing use cases include life science AI, reducing memory and I/O bottlenecks, data prepping, wireless networking, and as insurance for evolving protocols.
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