DAC 2021 – Joe Sawicki explains Digitalization

DAC 2021 – Joe Sawicki explains Digitalization
by Daniel Payne on 12-13-2021 at 10:00 am

semiconductor content min

Monday at DAC this year started off on a very optimistic note as Joe Sawicki from Siemens EDA presented in the Pavilion on the topic of Digitalization, a frequent theme in the popular press because of the whole Work From Home transition that we’ve gone through during the pandemic. Several industries are benefiting from the… Read More


System Technology Co-Optimization (STCO)

System Technology Co-Optimization (STCO)
by Daniel Payne on 11-30-2021 at 10:00 am

An early package prototype

My first exposure to seeing multiple die inside of a single package in order to get greater storage was way back in 1978 at Intel, when they combined two 4K bit DRAM die in one package, creating an 8K DRAM chip, called the 2109. Even Apple used two 16K bit DRAM chips from Mostek to form a 32K bit DRAM, included in the Apple III computer, circa… Read More


Machine Learning Applied to IP Validation, Running on AWS Graviton2

Machine Learning Applied to IP Validation, Running on AWS Graviton2
by Daniel Payne on 11-22-2021 at 10:00 am

Solido Variation Designer on Neoverse N1 CPU min

I recall meeting with Solido at DAC back in 2009, learning about their Variation Designer tool that allowed circuit designers to quickly find out how their designs performed under the effects of process variation, in effect finding the true corners of the process. Under the hood the Solido tool was using Machine Learning (ML) techniques… Read More


Synopsys Expands into Silicon Lifecycle Management

Synopsys Expands into Silicon Lifecycle Management
by Daniel Payne on 11-18-2021 at 10:00 am

SLM, Synopsys

I spoke with Steve Pateras of Synopsys last week to better understand what was happening with their Silicon Lifecycle Management vision, and I was reminded of a Forbes article from last year: Never Heard of Silicon Lifecycle Management? Join the Club. At least two major EDA vendors are now using the relatively new acronym SLM, and… Read More


Webinar: Boosting Analog IC Layout Productivity

Webinar: Boosting Analog IC Layout Productivity
by Daniel Payne on 11-09-2021 at 10:00 am

Animate Preview

Digital IC designers use a well-known methodology with pre-designed standard cells and other IP blocks playing a major re-use role, however in the analog IC design world there are more nuanced requirements which often dictate that a new analog block be highly customized. The downside is that customizing analog IC layout takes… Read More


Webinar – How to manage IP-XACT complexity in conjunction with RTL implementation flow

Webinar – How to manage IP-XACT complexity in conjunction with RTL implementation flow
by Daniel Payne on 10-26-2021 at 10:00 am

RTL Integration

Standards help our EDA and IP industry grow more quickly and with less CAD integration efforts, and IP-XACT is another one of those Accellera standards (1685-2009) that is coming of age, and enabling IP reuse for SoC design teams. Here at SemiWik, we’ve been writing about Defacto Technologies and their prominent use of IP-XACT… Read More


APR Tool Gets a Speed Boost and Uses Less RAM

APR Tool Gets a Speed Boost and Uses Less RAM
by Daniel Payne on 10-18-2021 at 10:00 am

Aprisa

Automatic Place and Route (APR) tools have been around since the 1980s for IC design teams to use, and before that routing was done manually by very patient layout designers. Initially the big IDMs had their own internal CAD groups coding APR tools in house, but eventually the commercial EDA market picked up this automation area,… Read More


Webinar – Comparing ARM and RISC-V Cores

Webinar – Comparing ARM and RISC-V Cores
by Daniel Payne on 10-14-2021 at 10:00 am

Mirabilis Webinar, October 21

Operating systems and Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) can have long lifespans, and I’ve been an engineering user of many ISAs since the 1970s. For mobile devices I’ve followed the rise to popularity of the ARM architecture, and then more recently the RISC-V ISA which has successfully made the leap from university… Read More


High Reliability Power Management Chip Simulation and Verification for Automotive Electronics

High Reliability Power Management Chip Simulation and Verification for Automotive Electronics
by Daniel Payne on 10-11-2021 at 10:00 am

iWave waveform min

Automotive electronics bring strong demand for power management chips, but its strict reliability requirements also pose new challenges for chip designers. The chip needs to be able to work in various harsh environments such as high temperature, low temperature, aging, abnormal power supply, etc. Although the traditional… Read More


Electromigration and IR Drop Analysis has a New Entrant

Electromigration and IR Drop Analysis has a New Entrant
by Daniel Payne on 09-28-2021 at 9:00 am

mPower capacity

My first IR drop analysis was back in the early 1980s at Intel, where I had to manually model the parasitics of the VDD and VSS interconnect for all of the IO cells that our team was designing in a graphics chip, then I ran that netlist in a SPICE simulator using transient analysis, measuring the bounce in VSS and droop in VDD levels as all… Read More