Portable Stimulus Standard, What’s New from Cadence

Portable Stimulus Standard, What’s New from Cadence
by Daniel Payne on 09-27-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’ve been hearing about the Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) since DAC 2016, so it’s helpful to get an update from EDA vendors on what their involvement level is with this emerging standard and how they see it helping design and verification engineers. Earlier in September I scheduled a conference call with Cadence… Read More


Improved Memory Design, Characterization and Verification

Improved Memory Design, Characterization and Verification
by Daniel Payne on 09-19-2017 at 12:00 pm

My IC design career started out with DRAM design, characterization and verification back in the 1970’s, so I vividly recall how much SPICE circuit simulation was involved, and how little automation we had back in the day, so we tended to cobble together our own scripts to help automate the process a bit. With each new process… Read More


Semiconductor Device Physics, Lab in a Box

Semiconductor Device Physics, Lab in a Box
by Daniel Payne on 09-13-2017 at 12:00 pm

One of my favorite classes in college was the lab exercise, mostly because we actually got to use real electronics and then measure something, finally writing it up in our lab notebooks. The issue today is that a college student taking Electrical Engineering probably doesn’t have much access to 10nm FinFET silicon for use… Read More


Webinar: Mobile Device Companies Get New Sensor Interconnect Standard

Webinar: Mobile Device Companies Get New Sensor Interconnect Standard
by Daniel Payne on 09-04-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’ve been a mobile device user since the 1980’s when the Motorola brick phone was introduced, so I’ve seen an increasing amount of sensors added to each new generation of mobile phones over the years. One big challenge to both sensor companies and fabless semiconductor companies designing SoCs for mobile devices… Read More


Getting More Productive Coding with SystemVerilog

Getting More Productive Coding with SystemVerilog
by Daniel Payne on 08-31-2017 at 12:00 pm

HDL languages are a matter of engineering personal preference and often corporate policy dictates which language you should be using on your next SoC design. In the early days we used our favorite text-based editor like Vi or Emacs, my choice was Vi. The problem with these text-based editors of course is that they really don’t… Read More


Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm at DAC

Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 08-24-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’m a user of many Samsung products as my family has Samsung Galaxy smart phones and my MacBook Pro uses Samsung SSD for storage, so at DAC I attended a breakfast panel with presenters from Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm. This was the second day of DAC and they served us breakfast, and with the big names on the panel the room was… Read More


Overcoming Mixed-Signal Design and Verification Challenges in Automotive and IoT Systems

Overcoming Mixed-Signal Design and Verification Challenges in Automotive and IoT Systems
by Daniel Payne on 08-10-2017 at 12:00 pm

At the recent DAC conference in Austin I attended a panel discussion over lunch where engineers from four companies talked about how they approached mixed-signal design and verification challenges for automotive and IoT systems. It seems like 2017 was the year of automotive at DAC, while in 2016 it was all about IoT. Both segmentsRead More


Emulation makes the What to See List

Emulation makes the What to See List
by Daniel Payne on 07-25-2017 at 12:00 pm

The analysts at Gary Smith EDA produce an annual What To See List for DAC and I quickly noticed that all three major EDA vendors were included on the list for the specific category of emulation. The big problem that emulation addresses is the ability to run in hardware an early version of your SoC so that software developers can get access… Read More


Something New in IP Lifecycle Management

Something New in IP Lifecycle Management
by Daniel Payne on 07-19-2017 at 12:00 pm

Last month at DAC I met up with Michael Munsey of Methodics to get a quick update on what has been happening over the past 12 months within his company, and he quickly invited me to watch an archived webinar on their latest tool for IP Lifecycle Management called Percipient. I love to play the board game Scrabble, so i had to Google the … Read More


HLS update from Mentor about Catapult

HLS update from Mentor about Catapult
by Daniel Payne on 07-17-2017 at 12:00 pm

I recall back in the late 1980’s when logic synthesis tools were first commercialized, at first they could read in a gate-level netlist from one foundry then output an optimized netlist back into the same foundry. Next, they could migrate your gate-level netlist from Vendor A over to Vendor B, giving design companies some… Read More