New Tech Press » Electronic Design

IC design is focused on wrong problems

admin — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:32:43 +0000

By Lou Covey
Editorial Director

The semiconductor design industry is focused on the wrong problems, according to Brad Brech, distinguished engineer at IBM at the ISQED symposium in Santa Clara yesterday. Stating his position in the most diplomatic terms, that was the upshot of his talk on “sustaining Innovation for Smarter Computing in Data Centers.”

While chip design is focused on increasing speed and computing power, Brech said efficiency and cost control are the biggest concerns of the end customer now.

Brech said the chip industry is still focused on incremental increases in performance but the improvements we see in semiconductors, 200ms to 300ms, is imperceptible to the end user.

“We need to bring a different kind of value to the customer,” he said. “In the 1970s and 80s the airline industry was trying to move people faster between destinations and almost went bankrupt doing it,” he stated. “There hasn’t been a faster plane put into service in over 20 years, but they have found ways to move more people. We need to do the same thing in IT regarding data.”

Brech stated that 70 percent of the IT budget is devoted to operations and maintenance of data centers while complexity of managing massive amounts of data grows steadily by orders of magnitudes. He said 22 billion devices are connected to the internet now, downloading and adding data every second. Applications such as cognitive computing and big data analytics are compounding the problem.

The solution, he stated, is in alternative designs that are cloud ready, data ready and security ready. Those are the applications technology needs to focus on.

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Quest for the $10K chip: Services are a mature niche

admin — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:44:34 +0000

Continuing on our series on reducing the cost of semiconductor design and manufacturing, we interviewed Josh Lee, CEO of Uniquify, on the design services niche. Lee took mild exception on Gary’s Smith’s definition of the niche becoming a “wild west” of competition saying the combination of IP integration with services has created a mature industry that is competitive but also crucial to creating new products in absence of venture capital involvement.

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Quest for the $10K Chip: The wild west of design services

admin — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:38:51 +0000

In the fourth installment of our Quest for the 10K chip series, We return to the last part of the interview with EDA Analyst Gary Smith to discuss the reemergence of design services and their role in reducing the cost of chip design. Smith believes the industry is headed toward a new generation of ASIC houses, and says the advantage of ESL is that it allows designs to be handed off at any number of various sign off points. Smith believes the design services segment is in for big growth in the coming years.

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Esencia weighs in on the $10K Chip

admin — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:18:57 +0000

ESL startup Esencia has been making noise about the changing of the guard in IC design as the industry moves from RTL to ESL. In this third part of our series on the Quest the the 10K Chip, Karl Kaiser, VP of engineering for Esencia, talks about Gary Smith’s view of the cost of IC design and where ESL can continually lower that cost.

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Gary Smith, ESL and the Quest for the $10K Chip

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:59:03 +0000

In part two of our Quest for the 10K chip series, EDA Analyst Gary Smith discusses the need for ESL, how it will reduce the cost of designs, and why the time is right for ESL to be implemented now. Smith says in the past, we’ve leveraged IP reuse as a way to solve our design challenges, but we are now seeing 100 block designs with 100 million gate counts; IP reuse alone will not solve these challenges. In this video Smith discusses what he sees coming next to solve these challenges.

See Part 1 here.

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