By Adam Kovac, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan.

Cadence plans to acquire BETA CAE Systems for $1.24 billion, the latest volley in a race to sell multi-physics simulation and analysis across a broad set of customers with deep pockets. Cadence said the deal opens the door to structural analysis for the automotive, aerospace, industrial, and health care sectors. Under the terms of the agreement, 60% of the purchase would be paid in cash, and the remainder in stock.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service reported that North Korea was targeting cyberattacks at domestic semiconductor equipment companies, using a “living off the land” approach, in which the attacker uses minimal malware to attack common applications installed on the server. That makes it more difficult to spot an attack. According to the government, “In December last year, Company A, and in February this year, Company B, had their configuration management server and security policy server hacked, respectively, and product design drawings and facility site photos were stolen.”

As the memory market goes, so goes the broader chip industry. Last quarter, and heading into early 2024, both markets began showing signs of sustainable growth. DRAM revenue jumped 29.6% in Q4 for a total of $17.46 billion. TrendForce attributed some of that to  new efforts to stockpile chips and strategic production control. NAND flash revenue was up 24.5% in Q4, with solid growth expected to continue into the first part of this year, according to TrendForce. Revenue for the sector topped $11.4 billion in Q4, and it’s expected to grow another 20% this quarter. SSD prices rebounded in Q4, as well, up 15% to $23.1 billion. Across the chip industry, sales grew 15.2% in January compared to the same period in 2023, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). This is the largest increase since May 2022, and that trend is expected to continue throughout 2024 with double-digit growth compared to 2023.

Marvell said it is working with TSMC to develop a technology platform for the rapid deployment of analog, mixed-signal, and foundational IP. The company plans to sell both custom and commercial chiplets at 2nm.

The Dutch government is concerned that ASML, the only maker of EUV/high-NA EUV lithography equipment in the world, is considering leaving the Netherlands, according to De Telegraaf.

Quick links to more news:

Design and Power
Manufacturing and Test
Automotive and Batteries
Security
Pervasive Computing and AI
Events

Design and Power

AMD appears to have hit a roadblock with the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) over a new AI chip it designed for the Chinese market, as reported by Bloomberg. U.S. officials told the company the new chip is too powerful to be sold without a license.

JEDEC released its new memory standard as a free download on its website. The JESD239 Graphics Double Data Rate SGRAM can reach speeds of 192 GB/s and improve signal-to-noise ratio.

Accellera rolled out its IEEE Std. 1800‑2023 Standard for SystemVerilog—Unified Hardware Design, Specification, and Verification Language, which is now available for free download. The decision to offer it at no cost is due to Accellera’s participation in the IEEE GET Program, which was founded in 2010 with the intention of providing  open access to some standards. Accellera also announced it had approved for release the Verilog-AMS 2023 standard, which offers enhancements to analog constructs, dynamic tolerance for event control statements, and other upgrades.

Chiplets are a hot topic these days. Six industry experts discuss chiplet standards, interoperability, and the need for highly customized AI chiplets.

Optimizing EDA hardware for the cloud can shorten the time required for large and complex simulations, but not all workloads will benefit equally, and much more can be done to improve those that can.

Flex Logix is developing InferX DSP for use with existing EFLX eFPGA from 40nm to 7nm. InferX achieves about 30 times the DSP performance/mm² than eFPGA.

The number of challenges is growing in power semiconductors, just as it is in traditional chips. This tech talk looks at integrating power semiconductors with other devices, different packaging impacts, and how these devices will degrade over time.

Vultr announced it will use NVIDIA’s HGX H100 GPU clusters to expand its Seattle-based cloud data center. The company said the expansion, which will be powered by hydroelectricity, will make the facility one of the cleanest, most power efficient data centers in the country.

Amazon Web Services will expand its presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing a new $5.3 billion infrastructure region in the country that will launch in 2026. The new region will offer developers, entrepreneurs and companies access to healthcare, education and other services.

Google is teaming up with the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) to launch the XPRIZE Quantum Applications, with a $5 million in prizes for winners who can demonstrate ways to use quantum computing to solve real-world problems. Teams must submit a proposal that includes analysis of how long their algorithm would need to run before reaching a solution to a problem, such as improving drug development or designing new battery materials.

South Korea’s nepes corporation has turned to Siemens EDA for solutions in the development of advanced 3D-IC packages. The deal will see nepes incorporating several Siemens technologies, including the Calibre nmPlatform, Hyperlynx software and Xpedition Substrate Integrator software.

Siemens also formalized a partnership with Nuclei System Technology in which the pair of companies will work together on solution support for Nuclei’s RISC-V processor cores. The collaboration will allow clients to monitor CPU program execution in real-time via Nuclei’s RISC-V CPU Ips.

Keysight and ETS-Lindgren announced a breakthrough test solution for cellular devices using non-terrestrial networks. The solution is capable of measuring and validating the performance of both the transmitter and receiver of devices capable of supporting the network.

Nearly fifty companies raised $800 million for power electronics, data center interconnects, and more last month.

Manufacturing and Test

SEMI Europe issued a position statement to the European Union, warning against additional export controls or rules on foreign investment. SEMI argued that free trade partnerships are a better method for ensuring security than bans or restrictions.

Revenues for the top five wafer fab equipment manufacturers declined 1% YoY in 2023 to $93.5 billion, according to Counterpoint Research. The drop was attributed to weak spending on memory, inventory adjustments, and low demand in consumer electronics. The tide is changing, though.

Bruker closed two acquisitions. One involved Chemspeed Technologies, a Switzerland-based provider of automated laboratory R&D and QC workflow solutions. The second involved Phasefocus, an image processing company based in the UK.

A Swedish company, SCALINQ, released a commercially available large-scale packaging solution capable of controlling quantum devices with hundreds of qubits.

Solid Sands, a provider of testing and qualification technology for compilers and libraries, will partner with California-based Emprog to establish a representative presence in the U.S.

Automotive

Tesla halted production at its Brandenberg, Germany, gigafactory after an environmental activist group attacked an electricity pylon, reports the Guardian.

Stellantis will invest €5.6 billion (~$6.1B) in South America to support more than 40 new products, decarbonization technologies, and business opportunities.

The amount of data being collected, processed, and stored in vehicles is exploding, and so is the value of that data. That raises questions that are still not fully answered about how that data will be used, by whom, and how it will be secured.

While industry experts expect many benefits of V2X technology, technological and social hurdles to cross. But there is progress.

Infineon released its next-gen silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET trench technology with 650V and 1,200V options improving stored energies and charges by up to 20%, ideal for power semiconductor applications such as photovoltaics, energy storage, DC EV charging, motor drives, and industrial power supplies.

Hyundai selected Ansys to supply structural simulation solutions for vehicle body system analysis, providing end-to-end, predictively accurate capabilities for virtual performance validation.

ION Mobility used the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio for styling, mechanical engineering, and electric battery pack development for its ION M1-S electric motorbike.

Ethernovia sampled a family of automotive PHY transceivers that scale from 10 Gbps to 1 Gbps over 15 meters of automotive cabling.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved Waymo’s plan to expand its driverless robotaxi services to Los Angeles and other cities near San Francisco, reports Reuters.

By 2027, next-gen battery EVs (BEVs) will on average be cheaper to produce than comparable gas-powered cars, reports Gartner. But the firm noted that average cost of EV accident repair will rise by 30%, and 15% of EV companies founded in the last decade will be acquired or bankrupt.

University of California San Diego (UCSD) researchers developed a cathode material for solid-state lithium-sulfur batteries that is electrically conductive and structurally healable.

ION Storage Systems announced its anodeless and compressionless solid-state batteries (SSBs) achieved 125 cycles with under 5% capacity degradation in performance. ION has been working with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to test its SSB before expanding into markets such as EVs, energy storage, consumer electronics, and aerospace.

Security

Advanced process nodes and higher silicon densities are heightening DRAM’s susceptibility to Rowhammer attacks, as reduced cell spacing significantly decreases the hammer count needed for bit flips. A multi-layered, system-level approach is crucial to DRAM protection.

Researchers at Bar-Ilan University and Rafael Defense Systems proposed an analytical electromagnetic model for IC shielding against hardware attacks.

Keysight acquired the IP of Firmalyzer, whose firmware security analysis technology will be integrated into the Keysight IoT Security Assessment and Automotive Security solutions, providing analysis into what is happening inside the IoT device itself.

Flex Logix joined the Intel Foundry U.S. Military Aerospace Government (USMAG) Alliance, ensuring U.S. defense industrial base and government customers have access to the latest technology, enabling successful designs for mission critical programs.

The EU Council presidency and European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on a Cyber Solidarity Act and an amendment to the Cybersecurity Act (CSA) concerning managed security services.

The EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) and partners updated the compendium on elections cybersecurity in response to issues such as AI deep fakes, hacktivists-for-hire, the sophistication of threat actors, and the current geopolitical context.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched efforts to help secure the open source software ecosystem; updated its Public Safety Communications and Cyber Resiliency Toolkit; and issued other alerts including security advisories for VMware, Apple, and Cisco.

Pervasive Computing and AI

Johns Hopkins University engineers used natural language prompts and ChatGPT4 to produce detailed instructions to build a spiking neural network (SNN) chip. The neuromorphic accelerators could power real-time machine intelligence for next-gen embodied systems like autonomous vehicles and robots.

The global AI hardware market size was estimated at $53.71 billion in 2023, and is expected to reach about $473.53 billion by 2033, at a compound annual growth rate of 24.5%, reports Precedence Research.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers and partners built compact chips capable of converting light into microwaves, which could improve navigation, communication, and radar systems.

Fig. 1: NIST researchers test a chip for converting light into microwave signals. Pictured is the chip, which is the fluorescent panel that looks like two tiny vinyl records. The gold box to the left of the chip is the semiconductor laser that emits light to the chip. Credit: K. Palubicki/NIST

The Indian government is investing 103 billion rupees ($1.25B) in AI projects, including computing infrastructure and large language models (LLMs).

Infineon is collaborating with Qt Group, bringing Qt’s graphics framework to Infineon’s graphics-enabled TRAVEO T2G cluster MCUs to optimize graphical user interface (GUI) development.

Keysight leveraged fourth-generation AMD EPYC CPUs to develop a new benchmarking methodology to test mobile and 5G private network performance. The method uses realistic traffic generation to uncover a CPU’s true power and scalability while observing bandwidth requirements.

The AI industry is pushing a nuclear power revival, reports NBC, and Amazon bought a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania from Talen Energy for $650 million, according to WNEP.

Bank of America was awarded 644 patents in 2023 for technology including information security, AI, machine learning (ML), online and mobile banking, payments, data analytics, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).

Mistral AI’s large language model, Mistral Large, became available in the Snowflake Data Cloud for customers to securely harness generative AI with their enterprise data.

China’s smartphone unit sales declined 7% year over year in the first six weeks of 2024, with Apple declining 24%, reports Counterpoint.

Shipments of LCD TV panels are expected to reach 55.8 million units in Q1 2024, a 5.3% quarter over quarter increase, reports TrendForce. And an estimated 5.8 billion LED lamps and luminaires are expected to reach the end of their lifespan in 2024, triggering a wave of secondary replacements and boosting total LED lighting demand to 13.4 billion units.

Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) researchers mined high-purity gold from electrical and electronic waste.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the University of Utah launched a National Data Platform pilot project, aimed at making access to and use of scientific data open and equitable.

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Further Reading and Newsletters

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Part of the hierarchical development flow is about to get a lot simpler, thanks to a new standard being created by Accellera. What is less clear is how long will it take before users see any benefit.

At the register transfer level (RTL), when a data signal passes between two flip flops, it initially is assumed that clocks are perfect. After clock-tree synthesis and place-and-route are performed, there can be considerable timing skew between the clock edges arriving those adjacent flops. That makes timing sign-off difficult, but at least the clocks are still synchronous.

But if the clocks come from different sources, are at different frequencies, or a design boundary exists between the flip flops — which would happen with the integration of IP blocks — it’s impossible to guarantee that no clock edges will arrive when the data is unstable. That can cause the output to become unknown for a period of time. This phenomenon, known as metastability, cannot be eliminated, and the verification of those boundaries is known as clock-domain crossing (CDC) analysis.

Special care is required on those boundaries. “You have to compensate for metastability by ensuring that the CDC crossings follow a specific set of logic design principles,” says Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent. “The general process in use today follows a hierarchical approach and requires that the clock-domain crossing internal to an IP is protected and safe. At the interface of the IP, where the system connects with the IP, two different teams share the problem. An IP provider may recommend an integration methodology, which often is captured in an abstraction model. That abstraction model enables the integration boundary to be verified while the internals of it will not be checked for CDC. That has already been verified.”

In the past, those abstract models differentiated the CDC solutions from veracious vendors. That’s no longer the case. Every IP and tool vendor has different formats, making it costly for everyone. “I don’t know that there’s really anything new or differentiating coming down the pipe for hierarchical modeling,” says Kevin Campbell, technical product manager at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “The creation of the standard will basically deliver much faster results with no loss of quality. I don’t know how much more you can differentiate in that space other than just with performance increases.”

While this has been a problem for the whole industry for quite some time, Intel decided it was time for a solution. The company pushed Accellera to take up the issue, and helped facilitate the creation of the standard by chairing the committee. “I’m going to describe three methods of building a product,” says Iredamola “Dammy” Olopade, chair of the Accellera working group, and a principal engineer at Intel. “Method number one is where you build everything in a monolithic fashion. You own every line of code, you know the architecture, you use the tool of your choice. That is a thing of the past. The second method uses some IP. It leverages reuse and enables the quick turnaround of new SoCs. There used to be a time when all IPs came from the same source, and those were integrating into a product. You could agree upon the tools. We are quickly moving to a world where I need to source IPs wherever I can get them. They don’t use the same tools as I do. In that world, common standards are critical to integrating quickly.”

In some cases, there is a hierarchy of IP. “Clock-domain crossings are a central part of our business,” says Frank Schirrmeister, vice president of solutions and business development at Arteris. “A network-on-chip (NoC) can be considered as ‘CDC central’ because most blocks connected to the NoC have different clocks. Also, our SoC integration tools see all of the blocks to be integrated, and those touch various clock domains and therefore need to deal with the CDC code that is inserted.”

This whole thing can become very messy. “While every solution supports hierarchical modeling, every tool has its own model solution and its own model representation,” says Siemens’ Campbell. “Vendors, or users, are stuck with a CDC solution, because the models were created within a certain solution. There’s no real transportability between any of the hierarchical modeling solutions unless they want to go regenerate models for another solution.”

That creates a lot of extra work. “Today, when dealing with customer CDC issues, we have to consider the customer’s specific environment, and for CDC, a potential mix of in-house flows and commercial tools from various vendors,” says Arteris’ Schirrmeister. “The compatibility matrix becomes very complex, very fast. If adopted, the new Accellera CDC standard bears the potential to make it easier for IP vendors, like us, to ensure compatibility and reduce the effort required to validate IP across multiple customer toolsets. The intent, as specified in the requirements is that ‘every IP provider can run its tool of choice to verify and produce collateral and generate the standard format for SoCs that use a different tool.'”

Everyone benefits. “IP providers will not need to provide extra documentation of clock domains for the SoC integrator to use in their CDC analysis,” says Ahmed Nasr, digital design manager at Mixel. “The standard CDC attributes generated by the EDA tool will be self-contained.”

The use model is relatively simple. “An IP developer signs off on CDC and then exports the abstract model,” says Real Intent’s Narain. “It is likely they will write this out in both the Accellera format and the native format to provide backward compatibility. At the next level of hierarchy, you read in the abstract model instead of reading in the full view of the design. They have various views of the IP, including the CDC view of the IP, which today is on the basis of whatever tool they use for CDC sign-off.”

The potential is significant. “If done right and adopted, the industry may arrive at a common language to describe CDC aspects that can streamline the validation process across various tools and environments used by different users,” says Schirrmeister. “As a result, companies will be able to integrate and validate IP more efficiently than before, accelerating development cycles and reducing the complexity associated with SoC integration.”

The standard
Intel’s Olopade describes the approach that was taken during the creation of the standard. “You take the most complex situations you are likely to find, you box them, and you co-design them in order to reduce the risk of bugs,” he said. “The boundaries you create are supposed to be simple boundaries. We took that concept, and we brought it into our definition to say the following: ‘We will look at all kinds of crossings, we will figure out the simple common uses, and we will cover that first.’ That is expected to cover 95% to 98% of the community. We are not trying to handle 700 different exceptions. It is common. It is simple. It is what guarantees production quality, not just from a CDC standpoint, but just from a divide-and-conquer standpoint.”

That was the starting point. “Then we added elements to our design document that says, ‘This is how we will evaluate complexity, and this is how we’ll determine what we cover first,'” he says. “We broke things down into three steps. Step one is clock-domain crossing. Everyone suffers from this problem. Step two is reset-domain crossing (RDC). As low power is getting into more designs, there are a lot more reset domains, and there is risk between these reset domains. Some companies care, but many companies don’t because they are not in a power-aware environment. It became a secondary consideration. Beyond the basic CDC in phase one, and RDC in phase two, all other interesting, small usage complexities will be handled in phase three as extensions to the standard. We are not going to get bogged down supporting everything under the sun.”

Within the standards group there are two sub-groups — a mapping team and a format team. Common standards, such as AMBA, UCIe, and PCIe have been looked at to make sure that these are fully covered by the standard. That means that the concepts should be useful for future markets.

“The concepts contained in the standard are extensible to hardened chiplets,” says Mixel’s Nasr. “By providing an accurate standard CDC view for the chiplet, it will enable integration with other chiplets.”

Some of those issues have yet to be fully explored. “The standard’s current documentation primarily focuses on clock-domain crossing within an SoC itself,” says Schirrmeister. “Its direct applicability to the area of chiplets would depend on further developments. The interfaces between fully hardened IP blocks on chiplets would communicate through standard interfaces like UCIe, BoW, or XSR, so the synchronization issues between chiplets on substrates would appear to be elevated to the protocol levels.”

Reset-domain crossings have yet to appear in the standard. “The genesis of CDC is asynchronous clocks,” says Narain. “But the genesis for reset-domain crossing is asynchronous resets. While the destination is due to the clock, the source of the problem is somewhere else. And as a result, the nature of the problem, the methodology that people use to manage that problem, are very different. The kind of information that you need to retain, and the kind of information that you can throw away, is different for every problem. Hence, abstractions are actually very customized for the application.”

Does the standard cover enough ground? That is part of the purpose of the review period that was used to collect information. “I can see some room for future improvement — for example, making some attributes mandatory like logic, associated_clocks, clock_period for clock ports,” says Nasr. “Another proposed improvement is adding reconvergence information, to be able to detect reconverging outputs of parallel synchronizers.”

The impact of all of this, if realized, is enormous. “If you truly run a collaborative, inclusive, development cycle, two things will happen,” says Olopade. “One, you are going to be able to find multiple ways to solve each problem. You need to understand the pros and cons against the real problems you are trying to solve and agree on the best way we should do it together. For each of those, we record the options, the pros and cons, and the reason one was selected. In a public review, those that couldn’t be part of that discussion get to weigh in. We weigh it against what they are suggesting versus why did we choose it. In the cases where it is part of what we addressed, and we justified it, we just respond, and we do not make a change. If you’re truly inclusive, you do allow that feedback to cause you to change your mind. We received feedback on about three items that we had debated, where the feedback challenged the decisions and got us to rehash things.”

The big challenge
Still, the creation of a standard is just the first step. Unless a standard is fully adopted, its value becomes diminished. “It’s a commendable objective and a worthy endeavor,” says Schirrmeister. “It will make interoperability easier and eventually allow us, and the whole industry, to reduce the compatibility matrix we maintain to deal with vendor tools individually. It all will depend on adoption by the vendors, though.”

It is off to a good start. “As with any standard, good intentions sometimes get severed by reality,” says Campbell. “There has been significant collaboration and agreements on how the standard is being pushed forward. We did not see self-submarining, or some parties playing nice just to see what’s going on but not really supporting it. This does seem like good collaboration and good decision making across the board.”

Implementation is another hurdle. “Will it actually provide the benefit that it is supposed to provide?” asks Narain. “That will depend upon how completely and how quickly EDA tool vendors provide support for the standard. From our perception, the engineering challenge for implementing this is not that large. When this is standardized, we will provide support for it as soon as we can.”

Even then, adoption isn’t a slam dunk. “There are short- and long-term problems,” warns Campbell. “IP vendors already have to support multiple formats, but now you have to add Accellera on top of that. There’s going to be some pain both for the IP vendors and for EDA vendors. We are going to have to be backward-compatible and some programs go on for decades. There’s a chance that some of these models will be around for a very long time. That’s the short-term pain. But the biggest hurdle to overcome for a third-party IP vendor, and EDA vendor, is quality assurance. The whole point of a hierarchical development methodology is faster CDC closure with no loss in quality. The QA load here is going to be big, because no customer is going to want to take the risk if they’ve got a solution that is already working well.”

Some of those issues and fears are expected to be addressed at the upcoming DVCon conference. “We will be providing a tutorial on CDC,” says Olopade. “The first 30 minutes covers the basics of CDC for those who haven’t been doing this for the last 10 years. The next hour will talk about the Accellera solution. It will concentrate on those topics which were hotly debated, and we need to help people understand, or carry people along with what we recommend. Then it may become more acceptable and more adoptive.”

Related Reading
Design And Verification Methodologies Breaking Down
As chips become more complex, existing tools and methodologies are stretched to the breaking point.

The post Accellera Preps New Standard For Clock-Domain Crossing appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.