How About a Quality-Aware IP Design Flow

How About a Quality-Aware IP Design Flow
by Daniel Payne on 05-28-2014 at 6:18 pm

In the EDA world we use hyphens quite often to describe our technical approaches, like: DFM-aware, Power-aware, Variation-aware. I just read a white papertoday on the topic of Quality-Aware IP Design Flows, written by Fractal Technologies. If your group creates IP or re-uses IP, then there’s always the question about … Read More


Two New ESL Tools for Power and Thermal at DAC

Two New ESL Tools for Power and Thermal at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 05-27-2014 at 6:47 pm

Gary Smith published a list of what to see at DAC, and I noticed that he listed DOCEA Power in a category of ESL Thermal. I’ll be meeting the DOCEA engineers on Wednesday at DAC to learn more about their two newest ESL products:

  • Thermal Profiler
  • Power Intelligence

In general DOCEA Power tools allow you to manage power and thermal… Read More


Different Approaches to System Level Power Modeling and Analysis for Early Design Phases

Different Approaches to System Level Power Modeling and Analysis for Early Design Phases
by Daniel Payne on 05-27-2014 at 3:14 pm

At DATEthis year in Dresden, Bernhard Fischer from Siemens CT(Corporate Technology) has presented an interesting summary of the various techniques used for power modeling and analysis at the architectural level. He went through the pros and cons of using spreadsheets, timed virtual platforms annotated with power numbers … Read More


Virtual Prototype Collaboration

Virtual Prototype Collaboration
by Daniel Payne on 05-20-2014 at 9:01 am

The concept and use of virtual prototypes continues to grow each year in electronics design, mostly because it really does shorten product development cycles by allowing software engineers to start early debug and fix errors prior to production. Other useful benefits to virtual prototyping include software optimization, … Read More


Full-Custom Low Power Design Methodology

Full-Custom Low Power Design Methodology
by Daniel Payne on 05-19-2014 at 1:30 pm

Digital designers have used logic optimization and logic synthesis for decades as a means to produce more optimal designs with EDA tools. On the analog and transistor-level side of design the efforts to automatically optimize for speed or power have generally been limited to circuits with only a handful of transistors. These … Read More


A Brief History of the Apple MacBook Pro

A Brief History of the Apple MacBook Pro
by Daniel Payne on 05-12-2014 at 5:49 pm

I’m typing this blog today with my trusty Apple MacBook Pro – a 17″ laptop with matte display and 16GB of RAM, but don’t stereotype me as an Apple fanboy because I also own the fantastic Samsung Galaxy Note II phone (aka phablet). Some industry pundits would have us believe that desktops and laptops are going… Read More


Analog and Full Chip Simulation at Micron

Analog and Full Chip Simulation at Micron
by Daniel Payne on 05-08-2014 at 12:50 pm

IDM companies like Micronuse SPICE circuit simulators during the design phase in order to predict timing, currents and power on their custom IC chip designs at the transistor level. A senior memory design engineer at Micron named Raed Sabbahtalked today at a webinarabout how the embedded solutions group uses the FineSimcircuit… Read More


IC Power Noise Reliability for FinFET Designs

IC Power Noise Reliability for FinFET Designs
by Daniel Payne on 05-06-2014 at 9:07 am

Reliability for ICs is a big deal because the last thing that you want to do is ship a new part only to find out later in the field that there are failures not being caught by testing. I’ve already had two consumer products fail this year because of probable reliability issues: My MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM started rebooting caused… Read More


RTL Designers Can Win a GoPro Camera at DAC

RTL Designers Can Win a GoPro Camera at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 04-30-2014 at 10:05 am

DACis just 33 days away and who wouldn’t want a cool GoPro camerato play with? Your manager will certainly want you to first check out what’s new at DAC if your job involves getting to RTL signoff on time and within budget. The creative folks at Atrenta have figured out how to attract us with the offer of winning a GoPro camera,… Read More


IC/Package/Board – Power, Noise and Reliability from ANSYS (Apache DA) at DAC

IC/Package/Board – Power, Noise and Reliability from ANSYS (Apache DA) at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 04-30-2014 at 10:04 am

ANSYS acquired Apache Design Automation back in June 2011and three years later the name “Apache” is being subdued in favor of using just ANSYS. One thing that I noticed right away was a DACfocus on having actual ANSYS customers talk about their hands-on experience using the EDA tools. The following seven customers… Read More