EDA and IP

EDA companies, Cadence, Mentor, a Siemens Business, Synopsys and semiconductor equipment industry association, SEMI, have joined forces to jointly develop the SEMI Server Certification protocol, to combat EDA software piracy. The protocol will define how servers can be identified to ensure that it is authentic and not a cloned version that is using software licenses without permission. Software pirates use ...

It has been an unusual DAC this year, as the show went virtual due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There was no exhibition floor as such, but there was a comprehensive programme of keynote speeches, presentations, tutorials and panel discussions. There was a lot of activity around RISC-V, including a presentation by Imperas Software (www.imperas.com) entitled What’s Next for RISC-V? Vectors, Verification, ...

SiFive, provider of Risc-V processor core intellectual property, has released a suite of upgrades to its products, increasing performance, and reducing power consumption and die area. The release has been dubbed ’20G1′, as the company has switched from ‘year-month’ naming to ‘year-release’ naming: 20G1 being the first ‘general’ release of 2020 “and encapsulates nine months of hard work and progress ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has meant that the Design Automation Conference (DAC) will be a virtual exhibition and conference this year. It will take place from Monday 20 July to Friday 24 July. Highlights of the show is a keynote on the opening morning by Philip Wong, chief scientist, TSCMC: Semiconductor Technology: A System Perspective on Monday 20 July 9.20am (US ...

Imagination technologies has created a GPU product line specifically for automotive use, building functional safety throughout the design to minimise the need for system-level safety intervention when meeting ISO 26262 requirements, according to the company. The automotive market is important to Imagination, which claims that over 200 million vehicles already have its GPUs in their digital cockpit displays and infotainment systems. “OEMs, Tier ...

Lattice Semiconductor has released the second family of devices developed from its Nexus 28nm FDSoI platform, equipping them with fast PCI Express (PCIe) and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces for co-processing, signal bridging, and system control. Certus-NX FPGAs, as they will be known, are intended to be general purpose, aimed at applications from data processing in automated industrial equipment to system management ...

With any new SoC project, there are more things to go wrong than ever imagined during the optimistic early phase of defining the product, writes Ron Press, of Mentor, a Siemens Business. However, the semiconductor industry continues to deliver incredible advances in IC capabilities. The most successful companies continually refine and optimize all aspects of chip design and fabrication, including ...

EDA and IP company, Synopsys, has acquired Qualtera, the big data analytics specialist for semiconductor test and manufacturing. The real-time observation of semiconductor test and manufacturing can provide intelligence on production to help decision making as well as to shorted iterative product introduction and improve yield. According to Qualtera, its big data analytics means anything that threatens to detract from ...

Mentor Graphics, now a Siemens subsidiary, has joined the O-RAN Alliance promoting interoperable 5G equipment standards. Mentor will focus on verification and validation requirements for open standards-based, highly-configurable network development. “While there are many challenges to building the products that comprise 5G networks, testing is the key to success,” says Mentor’s Joe Sawicki (pictured), “Mentor’s comprehensive silicon verification flow is ...

Nottingham-based start-up, Search For The Next (SFN) has announced that its Bizen transistor technology has received an award worth £1.7 million which will drive forward the development of the enabling transistor process technology that will, it claims, be the foundation for the success of British and worldwide industries in all sectors. “We are consigning CMOS to the history books,” says ...