Most IC engineers learn best by hands-on experience when another more experienced person can show us what to do. If you cannot find that experienced person, then the next best thing is a video from an expert. I was surprised to find out that video was so important today that the #2 most viewed web site on the Internet was www.youtube.com… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
Addressing MCU Mixed Signal Design Challenges
The emerging market for IoT and wearable devices are designed with mixed-signal IP that includes: embedded CPU, flash, analogue and radio.EDA and IP companies have recently worked together to allow us to design an MCU with mixed-signal IP blocks more efficiently. This morning I attended a webinar with presenters from ARMand … Read More
A New, Free, Web-Based EDA Toolset in the Cloud
In the 1990’s there was a push to build EDA frameworks, however they all failed because no user wanted to be locked into one EDA vendor tool flow. Fast forward to 2014 and there’s an emerging trend to use web-based EDA tools as a framework, instead of downloading and installing software to your desktop or device. I just… Read More
A New Digital Place and Route System
IC place and route tools can be very high-priced EDA software to purchase or lease, so there’s some good news for AMS designers that need an affordable digital place and route tool for their mostly analog designs. Today the team at Tanner EDAannounced a totally new place and route system has been added to their Schematic Driven… Read More
Semiconductor IP Validation Gets Faster
Semiconductor IP continues to grow in use for SoC design, and many chips can now use hundreds of IP blocks from multiple vendors. Validating the quality of the IP blocks is an important step in the design process, and you could perform manual validation and inspection of each new IP block at the expense of time and engineering effort.… Read More
Automating Analog Verification in Virtuoso
Digital designers have been automating the functional verification process for many years now, however when you talk to an analog designer about how they do verification you quickly realize that the typical process is quite ad-hoc and little automated. Necessity does create an opportunity so the software engineers at Methodics… Read More
Social Media at Atrenta
Atrentais well-known for their SpyGlass software that enables SoC engineers to run early design analysis on RTL code and create a hardware virtual prototype for analysis prior to implementation. Visiting their website you quickly see that social media plays an important role in connecting with engineers as links for Facebook,… Read More
Early RTL Power Analysis and Reduction
Power analysis and reduction for SoC designs is a popular topic because of our consumer electronics dominated economy, and the need to operate devices on a battery source for the maximum time before a recharge. Just from my desk I can see multiple battery-powered devices: Laptop, tablet, smart phone, e-book reader, bluetooth … Read More
AMS Verification and Regression Testing of SoC Designs
Digital verification engineers on SoC designs have adopted many techniques to help ensure first silicon success: using compiled simulators, constrained random test, simulation farms, SystemVerilog methodology, and self-checking testbenches. AMS verification has tended to be ad-hoc or sharply divided into separate analog… Read More
IC Implementation Tool Gets a Rewrite, Now 10X Faster
EDA start-up companies often have the advantage over established vendors by being able to start from scratch, instead of having to maintain some legacy code that no longer is competitive. But what happens when the established vendor decides to rewrite their IC implementation tools from scratch? In this case it’s good news,… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography