Help for Automotive and Safety-critical Industries

Help for Automotive and Safety-critical Industries
by Daniel Payne on 03-10-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’ve been an Electrical Engineer and a car driver since 1978, so I’ve always been attracted to how the automotive industry designs cars to be safer for me and everyone else around the globe. According to statistics compiled by the CDCI learned that some 33,700 Americans died by motor vehicle crashes in 2014, which is… Read More


Something New for Semiconductor Parametric Testing

Something New for Semiconductor Parametric Testing
by Daniel Payne on 03-01-2017 at 7:00 am

The familiar maxim that “time is money” certainly typifies our semiconductor industry where the mass production of chips, boards and systems helps to power our global economy and ever-increasing standard of living. The foundries that manufacture chips have to ensure that the process technology is in fact producing… Read More


What You Don’t Know about Parasitic Extraction for IC Design

What You Don’t Know about Parasitic Extraction for IC Design
by Daniel Payne on 02-23-2017 at 7:00 am

Out of college my first job was doing circuit design at the transistor-level with Intel, and to get accurate SPICE netlists for simulation we had to manually count the squares of parasitic interconnect for diffusion, poly-silicon and metal layers. Talk about a burden and chance for mistakes, I’m so thankful that EDA companies… Read More


Four Barriers to Using an SoC for IoT Projects

Four Barriers to Using an SoC for IoT Projects
by Daniel Payne on 02-16-2017 at 12:00 pm

I often read about the large number of expected IoT design starts around the world, so I started to think about what the barriers are for launching this industry in order to meet the projections. One of my favorite IoT devices is the Garmin Edge 820, a computer for cyclists that has sensors for speed, cadence, power, heart rate, altitude… Read More


Making Functional Simulation Faster with a Parallel Approach

Making Functional Simulation Faster with a Parallel Approach
by Daniel Payne on 02-14-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’ll never forgot working at Intel on a team designing a graphics chip when we wanted to simulate to ensure proper functionality before tapeout, however because of the long run times it was decided to make a compromise to speed things up by reducing the size of the display window to just 32×32 pixels. Well, when first silicon… Read More


SPICE Model Generation using Machine Learning

SPICE Model Generation using Machine Learning
by Daniel Payne on 02-05-2017 at 10:00 pm

AI and machine learning are two popular buzz words in the high-tech daily news, so you should be getting used to hearing about them by now. What I hadn’t realized was that EDA companies are starting to use machine learning techniques, and specifically targeted at the daunting and compute intensive task of creating SPICE models… Read More


Finding Transistor-level Defects Inside of Standard Cells

Finding Transistor-level Defects Inside of Standard Cells
by Daniel Payne on 01-31-2017 at 12:00 pm

In the earliest days of IC design the engineering work was always done at the transistor-level, and then over time the abstraction level moved upward to gate-level, cell-level, RTL level, IP reuse, and high-level modeling abstractions. The higher levels of abstraction have allowed systems to be integrated into an SoC that can… Read More


Four Steps for Logic Synthesis in FPGA Designs

Four Steps for Logic Synthesis in FPGA Designs
by Daniel Payne on 01-30-2017 at 12:00 pm

I remember meeting Ken McElvain at Silicon Compilers for the first time back in the 1980’s, he was a gifted EDA tool developer that did a lot of coding including logic synthesis, a cycle-based simulator and ATPG. Mentor Graphics acquired Silicon Compilers with Ken included, and he continued to create another logic synthesis… Read More


SoC Integration using IP Lifecycle Management Methodology

SoC Integration using IP Lifecycle Management Methodology
by Daniel Payne on 01-27-2017 at 12:00 pm

Small EDA companies often focus on a single point tool and then gradually over time they add new, complementary tools to start creating more of a sub-flow to help you get that next SoC project out on time. The most astute EDA companies often choose to partner with other like-minded companies to create tools that work together well,… Read More


TCAD Simulation of Organic Optoelectronic Devices

TCAD Simulation of Organic Optoelectronic Devices
by Daniel Payne on 01-20-2017 at 4:00 pm

In my office there are plenty of LED displays for me to look at throughout the day: three 24″ displays from Viewsonic, a 15″ display from Apple, an iPad, a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, a Nexus tablet, a Garmin 520 bike computer, and a temperature display. LED and OLED displays are ubiquitous in all sorts of consumer electronics,… Read More