As we watch the gravitational collapse of the semiconductor industry, it becomes increasingly obvious that the tech zeitgeist, with investment in close lockstep, is squarely centered on complete solutions, not enabling technologies. That this seems unfair (they couldn’t do it without us, and what we do is really, really hard)… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
The Revenge of Microprocessor Design: The Return of the Macro
(Two Star Wars™ allusions in one title – eat your heart out George Lucas.) Most of us are comfortable with the idea that you design more or less whatever you want in RTL and let the synthesis tool pick logic gates to implement that functionality. Sure it may need a little guidance here and there but otherwise synthesis is more or less … Read More
Perfecting the Great Verification Fugue
Michael Sanie (Senior Director Marketing in the Synopsys Verification Group) gave the wrap-up presentation at SpyGlass World recently, on the Synopsys Verification Direction. I learned from an interview Michael gave to Paul McLellan that he is an accomplished pianist. I’m a pianist also, though of considerably less talent,… Read More
Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?
Macbeth may have been uncertain of what he saw but, until recently, image recognition systems would have fared even less well. The energy and innovation put into increasingly complex algorithms always seemed to fall short of what any animal (including us humans) is able to do without effort. Machine vision algorithms have especially… Read More
SpyGlass World 2015 User Group Meeting
I attended SpyGlass World this week – to give you an update, to catch up with old friends, including users, and to meet some of the new (to me) players from the Synopsys side of the event. The event was held in the United Club at Levi stadium, just like last year. Don’t know if this will continue. Merging the SpyGlass User Group into SNUG… Read More
Simulating Full-System EMI for a Car in Just 28 Minutes
While there’s a lot of cool technology in modern semiconductors, it’s important to raise our sights periodically to understand how well these chips will work in the systems for which they are designed. One area driving a lot of semiconductor growth is automobile electronics. We’ve had drive-train control forever it seems, but… Read More
About That Landauer Limit…
You may have heard of the Landauer principle or the Landauer limit. This defines a lower bound on switching power dissipation in any form of digital circuit. Rolf Landauer first presented this principle in 1961, while working at IBM. It’s not limited by how the circuit is built – you can use FinFETS or spintronics or even dilithium… Read More
A Connectivity Verification Idea
A Wirble
In case you hadn’t noticed, I like to write from time to time about EDA product ideas. I assume these are somewhat original, but given the maxim “there’s nothing new under the sun…”, I may well be wrong. In any event, I like to share these ideas if only to demonstrate that innovation in EDA is not stalled because we’ve run out big,… Read More
SpyGlass World at Levi Stadium, October 21st
I suppose you might have something better to do next Wednesday but, seriously, it had better be pretty good. I admit I’m biased (I was the Atrenta CTO until very recently) but even given that and mixing metaphors, Atrenta really knocked it out of the park when they got the 49er stadium for their User Group meetings. You don’t have to … Read More
Applying EDA Concepts Outside Chip Design
(I changed the title of this piece as an experiment) Paul McLellan recently wrote on the topic of new ventures crossing the chasm (getting from initial but bounded success to a proven scalable business). That got me to thinking about the EDA market in general. In some ways it has a similar problem, stuck at $5B or so and single-digit… Read More
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The GlobalFoundries IPO March Continues