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
Author: Daniel Payne
High Reliability Power Management Chip Simulation and Verification for Automotive Electronics
Electromigration and IR Drop Analysis has a New Entrant
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
System-Level Modeling using your Web Browser
I’ve simulated IC designs at the transistor-level with SPICE, gate-level, RTL with Verilog, and even used cycle-based functional simulators. Sure, they each worked well, but only for the domain and purpose they were designed for. Industry analyst, Gary Smith predicted that the IC world would soon move to system-level… Read More
What to expect at the 58th DAC this December
I’ve attended the DAC conference and trade show since the late 1980s, and every visit has been a continuing learning experience about the EDA, IP and semiconductor industry. I first started attended as an EDA vendor in 1987, and since 2004 as a freelance marketing professional. There’s a significant amount of preparation… Read More
Reliability Analysis for Mission-Critical IC design
Mission-critical IC design for segments like automotive, aerospace, defense, medical and 5G have more stringent reliability analysis requirements than consumer electronics, and entails running special simulations for the following concerns:
- Electromigration analysis
- IR drop analysis
- MOS aging
- High-sigma Monte Carlo
AMS IC Designers need Full Tool Flows
Digital IC design gets a lot of attention, because all of our modern devices primarily use digital logic, but in reality whenever you have a sensor like a camera, accelerometer, gyroscope or any radio like Bluetooth, WiFi or NFC, then you’re really in the realm of analog, and that’s where mixed-signal IC design comes… Read More
Using Machine Learning to Improve EDA Tool Flow Results
Back in 2020 I first learned from Synopsys about how they had engineered a better way to do optimize layouts on digital designs by using machine learning techniques, instead of relying upon manual approaches. The product was named DSO.ai, standing for Design Space Optimization, and it produced a more optimal floor-plan in less… Read More
SoC Vulnerabilities
As I read both the popular and technical press each week I often see articles about computer systems being hacked, and here’s just a few vulnerabilities from this week:
- Global phone hacks expose darker side of Israel’s startup nation image
- How Taiwan is trying to defend against a cyber World War III
- Kaseya receives
Automotive Safety Island: Test, Safety, Security, ISO 26262
I first fell in love with electric vehicles back in 1978 as an Electrical Engineering student, studying at the University of Minnesota. What caught my fancy was a small advertisement listed in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine to build your own electric vehicle by replacing the gas engine of a Honda with an electric motor, so… Read More
Webinar: Learn about NVMe conformance Testing
Several years ago I recall upgrading my aging MacBook Pro laptop from using a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to a Solid State Drive (SSD) that used Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). Oh what a speed improvement when pushing that On button each morning to start the work day, or clicking an App to see it launch without delay. Another epiphany for me in … Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet