IC layouts go through extensive design rule checking to ensure correctness, before being accepted for fabrication at a foundry or IDM. There’s something called the antenna effect that happens during chip manufacturing where plasma-induced damage (PID) can lower the reliability of MOSFET devices. Layout designers run Design… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
Checking and Fixing Antenna Effects in IC Layouts
Soft checks are needed during Electrical Rule Checking of IC layouts
IC designs have physical verification applications like Layout Versus Schematic (LVS) at the transistor-level to ensure that layout and schematics are equivalent, in addition there’s an Electrical Rules Check (ERC) for connections to well regions called a soft check. The connections to all the devices needs to have the most… Read More
New Emulation, Enterprise Prototyping and FPGA-based Prototyping Launched
General purpose CPUs have run most EDA tools quite well for many years now, but if you really want to accelerate something like simulation then you start to look at using specializedhardware accelerators. . Emulators came onto the scene around 1986 and the processing power has greatly increased over the years, mostly in response… Read More
AI and SPICE Circuit Simulation Applications
Can you name the EDA vendor that first used AI starting 15 years ago for circuit designers using SPICE simulators? I can remember that vendor, it was Solido, now part of Siemens EDA, and I just read their 8 page paper on how they look at the various levels of AI being used in EDA to help IC designers work smarter and faster than using manual… Read More
Mastering Mixed-Signal Verification with Siemens Symphony Platform
Digital design and verification is well understood by EDA vendors and IC designers, however mixed-signal design and verification is more challenging, because the continuous nature of analog signals requires more compute resources and specialized design skills. Siemens EDA has a unique offering in what they call Symphony… Read More
CES 2024 and all things Cycling
From the comfort of my home office I attended CES 2024 virtually this week, and collected all the news for cyclists, and it’s mostly all about e-bikes. The total count of e-bike sales now even outnumber EV car sales worldwide, so that growth trend continues. Some 85% of all bikes sold in China are now e-bikes.
e-bikes
This single… Read More
Keysight EDA Connect World Tour
Video webinars are a main staple to learn what’s new about EDA tools and methodologies, but there’s nothing quite like meeting in person, where you can ask questions and gauge the expertise of the presenters. I was delighted to learn that Keysight is planning a literal world tour to update EDA customers and prospects on what they … Read More
Making UVM faster through a new configuration system
The Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) is a popular way to help verify SystemVerilog designs, and it includes a configuration system that unfortunately has some speed and usage issues. Rich Edelman from Siemens EDA wrote a detailed 20-page paper on the topic of how to avoid these issues, and I’ve gone through it to… Read More
Using PCB Automation for an AI and Machine Vision Product
I knew that HDMI was a popular standard used to connect consumer products like a monitor to a laptop, but most professional video and broadcast systems use the SDI (Serial Digital Interface) connector standard. Pleora Technologies, founded in 2000, currently serves the machine vision and manufacturing markets, including those… Read More
SystemVerilog Has Some Changes Coming Up
SystemVerilog came to life in 2005 as a superset of Verilog-2005. The last IEEE technical committee revision of the SystemVerilog LRM was completed in 2016 and published as IEEE 1800-2017.
Have the last seven years revealed any changes or enhancements that maintain SystemVerilog’s relevance and efficaciousness in the face … Read More
Elon Musk Given CHIPS Act & AI Oversight – Mulls Relocation of Taiwanese Fabs