Wednesday was the last day at #62DAC for me and I attended an Exhibitor Session entitled, Engineering the Semiconductor Digital Thread, which featured Vishal Moondhra, VP Solutions Engineering of Perforce IPLM and Michael Munsey, VP Semiconductor Industry at Siemens Digital Industries. Instead of just talking from slides,… Read More





Synopsys Enables AI Advances with UALink
The evolution of hyperscale data center infrastructure to support the processing of trillions of parameters for large language models has created some rather substantial design challenges. These massive processing facilities must scale to hundreds of thousands of accelerators with highly efficient and fast connections.… Read More
Revolutionizing Chip Packaging: The Impact of Intel’s Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB)
In an era dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing (HPC), the demand for semiconductors that deliver high data throughput, low latency, and energy efficiency has never been greater. Traditional chip designs often struggle to keep pace with these requirements, leading… Read More
Cocotb for Verification. Innovation in Verification
This time let’s see if we can stir up some lively debate. Cocotb isn’t new but it is an interesting alternative to mainstream testing methodologies. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our series … Read More
Can RISC-V Help Recast the DPU Race?
ARM’s Quiet Coup in DPUs
The datacenter is usually framed as a contest between CPUs (x86, ARM, RISC-V) and GPUs (NVIDIA, AMD, custom ASICs). But beneath those high-profile battles, another silent revolution has played out: ARM quietly displaced Intel and AMD in the Data Processing Unit (DPU) market.
DPUs — also called SmartNICs… Read More
Breaking out of the ivory tower: 3D IC thermal analysis for all
Todd Burkholder and Andras Vass-Varnai, Siemens EDA
As semiconductor devices become smaller, more powerful and more densely integrated, thermal management has shifted from an afterthought to a central challenge in modern IC design. In contemporary 3D IC architectures—where multiple chiplets are stacked and closely arrayed—power… Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment
There is a lot of talk about where Intel went wrong, the latest is missing AI, but people seem to forget one of the more defining blunders in the history of Intel. In April of 2012 Kirk Skaugen, the new general manager of Intel’s client PC group, moderated a Q&A with Mark Bohr, a 33+ year Intel fellow, and Brad Heaney, the Ivy Bridge… Read More
A Big Step Forward to Limit AI Power Demand
By now everyone knows that AI has become the all-consuming driver in tech and that NVIDIA GPU-based platforms are the dominant enabler of this revolution. Datacenters worldwide are stuffed with such GPUs, serving AI workloads from automatically drafting emails and summarizing meetings to auto-creating software and controlling… Read More
Free and Open Chip Design Tools: Opportunities, Challenges, and Outlook
Designing semiconductor chips has traditionally been costly and controlled by a few major Electronic Design Automation (EDA) vendors—Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens EDA who dominate with proprietary tools protected by NDAs and restrictive licenses. Fabrication also requires expensive, often export-controlled equipment.… Read More
Chiplets: providing commercially valuable patent protection for modular products
Many products are assembled from components manufactured and distributed separately, and it is important to consider how such products are manufactured when seeking to provide commercially valuable patent protection. This article provides an example in the field of computer chip manufacture.
Chiplets
A system-on-a-chip
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?