-
-
News
News Highlights
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueSilicon to Systems: From Soup to Nuts
This month, we asked our expert contributors to weigh in on silicon to systems—what it means to PCB designers and design engineers, EDA companies, and the rest of the PCB supply chain... from soup to nuts.
Cost Drivers
In this month’s issue of Design007 Magazine, our expert contributors explain the impact of cost drivers on PCB designs and the need to consider a design budget. They discuss the myriad design cycle cost adders—hidden and not so hidden—and ways to add value.
Mechatronics
Our expert contributors discuss the advent of mechatronics in PCB design, the challenges and opportunities this creates for circuit board designers, and the benefits—to the employee and the company—of becoming a mechatronics engineer.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
Sondrel Announces Advanced Modelling Process for AI Chip Designs
September 10, 2024 | SondrelEstimated reading time: 2 minutes
Sondrel, a leading provider of ultra-complex custom chips for leading global technology brands, has announced an Advanced Modelling Process for AI chip designs. This runs through every stage of a chip’s design to ‘prove’ that the design is what was specified – Functional Verification -- and that it does what it is supposed do – Performance Verification.
Paul Martin, Sondrel’s Global Field Engineering Director, explained, “AI chips are extremely complex to design because of the huge amounts of data that have to flow round them between the heterogeneous processors, IO and the memory. There cannot be periods when the processors are stalled waiting for data, which is made more complicated when the chip has several different types of processors each with different data traffic requirements. This new Process enables us to analyse and balance the dataflow through the chip whilst executing the software workloads on the AI chip.
“This uses accurate, cycle-based, system performance modelling early in the design cycle in advance of RTL development, enabling us to check that the design will meet its specification. The Process then continually evolves as RTL and eventually silicon becomes available to validate the design performs as specified. To accelerate the design process, we base the design on our Architecting the Future platform to ensure that we have a reliable, predictable path to market. This means we are reusing pre-verified design elements in the Process that constrain the solution space whilst ensuring high confidence in the integration of those elements, which also reduces risk and time to market.”
Power consumption by AI is a hot topic with some predictions saying that the power consumption of data centres could as much as triple the world’s energy needs. With AI proliferating everywhere to make devices smarter, there is an obvious drive to process data as much as possible before sending it to the cloud – so called AI at the Edge. To do this efficiently means that the power consumption of these compute intensive chips must be minimised which means using advanced nodes to hit the targets. Sondrel has always specialised in designing at the leading edge of chip technology and is currently working on 3nm designs. Advanced process technologies enable the power usage to be constrained whilst delivering the performance from using billions of transistors required from these ultra-complex custom chips.
A key to the Process is that it is able to extract the behavioural interaction between the processors and the memory and then map it onto the rest of the chip’s functions. This insight enables Sondrel’s designers to see how the chip is performing and to optimise the design to achieve the required balance of Power, Performance and Area.
Suggested Items
PCB Designers: ‘Level Up’ IC, Packaging Knowledge
09/16/2024 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007 MagazineSoo Lan Cheah is kind of a unicorn in the industry. She is an IPC instructor based in Malaysia, and she has years of experience designing integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. I knew I had to get her thoughts for this issue on silicon-to-systems. I asked Soo Lan to discuss her cross-discipline background and what silicon-to-systems means to her.
IPC White Paper Calls for Comprehensive Roadmap to Address Advanced Packaging to Board-Level Integration Challenges
09/16/2024 | IPCThe increasing complexity of integrated systems demands a holistic approach to design, materials, assembly, reliability, and metrology across all levels of integration, from chip to package to board. IPC’s Technology Solutions group addresses these challenges and suggests a comprehensive roadmap in their new white paper, “Advanced Packaging to Board Level Integration—Needs and Challenges.”
ASC Sunstone Circuits to Exhibit at the Anaheim Electronics & Manufacturing Show (AEMS) 2024
09/16/2024 | ASC SunstoneAmerican Standard Circuits | ASC Sunstone will be exhibiting at the Anaheim Electronics & Manufacturing Show 2024 to be held October 2-3 at the Anaheim Conventions Center in Anaheim, California.
Omni Design Technologies Partners with Aura Intelligent Systems on Next Generation Radar
09/16/2024 | BUSINESS WIREOmni Design Technologies, a leading provider of high-performance, low-power data acquisition and signal-processing solutions, and Aura Intelligent Systems, a developer of high-resolution imaging radar for ADAS and autonomous vehicles, announced a partnership on Aura’s next generation digital radar development.
Comtech Launches New Digital Common Ground Modem Product Line for DoD and Coalition Customers
09/13/2024 | BUSINESS WIREComtech, a global technology leader, today announced the launch of the Company’s new Digital Common Ground (“DCG”) portfolio of modems.