The relentless pursuit for maximizing performance in semiconductor development is now matched by the crucial need to minimize energy consumption. Traditional simulation-based power analysis methods face insurmountable challenges to accurately capture complex designs activities in real-world scenarios. As the scale of modern SoC designs explodes, a new pre-silicon dynamic power analysis methodology is essential. This … Read more

2024 DVCon was very busy this year. Bernard Murphy and I were in attendance for SemiWiki, he has already written about it.  Multi die and chiplets was again a popular topic. Lauro Rizzatti, a consultant specializing in hardware-assisted verification, moderated an engaging panel, sponsored by Synopsys, focusing on the intricacies of verifying multi-die systems. The … Read more

GPU, the ubiquitous graphics processing unit, is arguably the most important computing technology today. It made AI processing possible but at an unsustainable cost, exacerbated by enormous power consumption. A revolution is underway in the software development world. The paradigm that ruled software engineering as originally conceived consists of a sequence of instructions executed on … Read more

After dominating the computing landscape since the mid-1940s, the CPU architecture got demoted. As long as the escalating demand for powerful data processing outpaced the requirements for high bandwidth data movement, CPUs delivered what was expected from them. The rise of big data feeding high-performance computing (HPC) tilted the balance in favor of massive data … Read more

When we last saw Luc Burgun’s name in the semiconductor industry, he was CEO and co-founder of EVE (Emulation and Verification Engineering), creator of the ZeBu (Zero Bugs) hardware emulator. EVE was acquired by Synopsys in 2012. After the acquisition, Luc moved out of EDA and became an investor. Join me as I catch up … Read more

The semiconductor industry closed 2023 on a high note as the U.S. CHIPS Act brought renewed attention to our importance and product introductions from startups and established players buoyed our confidence. Technological innovations will continue into 2024 along the same trends line much as they did last year more or less. Despite a drop in … Read more

What you’ll learn: Lauro Rizzatti has turned his vast understanding of the semiconductor and verification markets to generative AI to better understand its benefits and limitations, something long overdue as myths and misconceptions multiply across the internet. Below he debunks 11 of those myths surrounding the technology. 1. Any computing engine, whether CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, … Read more

Software is eating the world today while hardware is feeding it and data is driving it. In 2024, software will be eating the hardware as AI and Generative AI take more and more compute power to execute. GenAI also needs substantial data communication throughput delivered by the underlying hardware infrastructure. These demanding requirements are necessary … Read more

The latest algorithms, such as GPT-4, pose a challenge to the current state-of-the-art processing hardware, and GenAI accelerators aren’t keeping up. In fact, no hardware on the market today can run the full GPT-4. Current large language model (LLM) development focuses on creating smaller but more specialized LLMs that can run on existing hardware is a diversion. … Read more

Two recent software-based algorithmic technologies –– autonomous driving (ADAS/AD) and generative AI (GenAI) –– are keeping the semiconductor engineering community up at night. While ADAS at Level 2 and Level 3 are on track, AD at Levels 4 and 5 are far from reality, causing a drop in venture capital enthusiasm and money. Today, GenAI … Read more