IP and Data Management (DM) for SoC teams has gradually moved from ad-hoc approaches using simple Excel spreadsheets, to home-grown software that is specific to a project or company, and finally to commercially supported tools. One such commercial toolset for IP lifecycle management is from Methodics, named ProjectIC –… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
DAC Update on IC Design Tools at Mentor
On Tuesday morning I headed off to the Mentorbooth at DACfor an update on their Custom IC Design and AMS Simulation/Verification tools, Christopher Cone was the presenter. Also in the room were Jay Madiraju, and Mick from Berkeley DA.… Read More
IO Design Optimization Flow for Reliability in 28nm
User group meetings are a rich source of information for IC designers because they have actual designers talking about how they used EDA tools in their methodology to achieve a goal. Engineers at STMicroelectronicspresented at a MunEDAUser Group on the topic: I/O Design Optimization Flow For Reliability In Advanced CMOS Nodes.… Read More
Making IP Reuse and SoC Integration Easier
The last graphics chip that I worked on at Intel was functionally simulated with only a tiny display size of 16×16 pixels, because that size allowed a complete regression test to be simulated overnight. Our team designed three major IP blocks: Display Processor, Graphics Processor and Bus Interface Unit. We wanted to also… Read More
Ensuring ESD Integrity
Electro Static Discharge (ESD) is a fact of life for IC designs and has been ever since electronics were first created and then started failing because of sudden, large currents flowing through the design caused by human, processing or machine contact. It’s just too expensive to layout an IC today, fabricate it, test for … Read More
Power Modeling and Simulation of System Memory Subsystem
One great benefit of designing at the ESL level is the promise of power savings on the order of 40% to 70% compared to using an RTL approach. Since a typical SoC can contain a hierarchy of memory, this kind of power savings could be a critical factor in meeting PPA goals. To find out how an SoC designer could use such an ESL approach to power… Read More
Catching IC Manufacturing Defects With Slack-Based Transition Delay Testing
Test engineers are often the unsung heroes in the semiconductor world, because they have the tough job of deciding if each IC is good or bad, while taking the least amount of time on a tester and ensuring that the tests are actually finding and uncovering all manufacturing and process variation defects. Simple stuck-at fault models… Read More
Modeling and Analysis of Single Event Effects (SEE)
Single Event Effects (SEE) are important because we depend upon our consumer, industrial and aerospace products to work reliably. Protons, electrons, neutrons, or alpha particles may perturb the MOS or bipolar device operation in either a destructive or non-destructive fashion. Galactic cosmic rays are one source of these… Read More
An Approach to Clock Domain Crossing for SoC Designs
Blogger Pawan Fangaria wrote about Clock Domain Crossing(CDC) a few weeks ago, and so I followed up tonight and watched a webinarabout CDC presented by Ravindra Anejaof Atrenta. An RTL design engineer would ultimately want a CDC verification tool that offers:
- Fast throughput and thoroughness
- Ability to debug and fix the source
Analog FastSPICE Update at DAC
Tuesday night over dinner at DAC I was able to chat with Ravi Subramanian, CEO of Berkeley DA, recently acquired by Mentor Graphics back on March 21st. This acquisition provided Mentor with an Analog FastSPICE circuit simulator to round out its collection of simulators.… Read More
Selling the Forges of the Future: U.S. Report Exposes China’s Reliance on Western Chip Tools