Visual Debugging at Altera on Billion-Transistor Chips

Visual Debugging at Altera on Billion-Transistor Chips
by Daniel Payne on 03-15-2013 at 10:38 am

My first job out of college was doing transistor-level circuit design, so I’m always curious about how companies are doing billion-transistor chip design and debug these days at the FPGA companies.

I spoke with Yaron Kretchmer,he works at Altera and manages the engineering infrastructure group where they have a compute… Read More


ARM Cortex SoC Prototyping Platform for Industrial Applications

ARM Cortex SoC Prototyping Platform for Industrial Applications
by Daniel Payne on 03-14-2013 at 1:00 pm

If your next SoC uses an ARM Cortex-A9 and has an industrial application, then you can save much design and debug time by using a prototyping platform. The price to prototype is quite affordable, and the methodology has a short learning curve. Bill Tomasan Aldec Research Engineer conducted a webinar today on: ARM Cortex SoC PrototypingRead More


Standard Cell Library Characterization

Standard Cell Library Characterization
by Daniel Payne on 03-13-2013 at 1:01 pm

Standard cell library characterization has been around for decades, Synopsys has been offering Liberty NCXand Cadence has Virtuoso Foundation IP Characterization. What’s new is that Mentor Graphics acquired the Z Circuit technology for library characterization and has integrated it with the Eldo Classic circuit … Read More


Visually Debugging IC Designs for AMS and Mixed-Languages

Visually Debugging IC Designs for AMS and Mixed-Languages
by Daniel Payne on 03-12-2013 at 4:18 pm

With an HDL-based design methodology many IC engineers code in text languages like SystemVerilog and VHDL, so it’s only natural to use a text-based debug methodology. The expression that, “A picture is worth a thousand words” comes to my mind and in this case a visual debug approach is worth considering for … Read More


Image Sensor Design for IR at Senseeker

Image Sensor Design for IR at Senseeker
by Daniel Payne on 03-05-2013 at 10:30 am

Image sensors are all around us with the cell phone being a popular example, and 35mm DSLR camera being another one. Last week I spoke with Kenton Veeder, an engineer at Senseeker that started his own image sensor IP and consulting services company. Instead of focusing on the consumer market, Kenton’s company does sensor … Read More


Learning Properties, Assertions and Covers for Hardware Design

Learning Properties, Assertions and Covers for Hardware Design
by Daniel Payne on 02-25-2013 at 12:10 pm

How do you learn new hardware design topics? I just got trained online about property-based verification for hardware designers using a free online class at Aldec. The material was created by Jerry Kaczynski, a Research Engineer at Aldec.

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FinFET Design Challenges at 14nm and 10nm

FinFET Design Challenges at 14nm and 10nm
by Daniel Payne on 02-25-2013 at 11:09 am

speaker vassiliosgerousis

At DAC 2012 we were hearing about the 20nm design ecosystem viability, however IC process technology never stands still so we have early process development going on now at the 10nm and 14nm nodes where FinFET technology is being touted. Earlier in February Vassilios Gerousis, a distinguished engineer at Cadence presented a session… Read More


Modeling TSV, IBIS-AMI and SERDES with HSPICE

Modeling TSV, IBIS-AMI and SERDES with HSPICE
by Daniel Payne on 02-21-2013 at 8:10 pm

The HSPICE circuit simulator has been around for decades and is widely used by IC designers worldwide, so I watched the HSPICE SIG by video today and summarize what happened. Engineers from Micron, Altera and AMD presented on how they are using HSPICE to model TSVs, IBiS-AMI models and SERDES, respectively.… Read More


SPICE Circuit Simulation at STMicroelectronics

SPICE Circuit Simulation at STMicroelectronics
by Daniel Payne on 02-20-2013 at 11:18 am

At the 2010 DACI moderated a panel session on SPICE and Fast SPICE circuit simulation, and one of the panelists was PierLuigi Dagliofrom STMicroelectronics. To get an update on SPICE circuit simulation at ST I read a PDF document at Mentor titled: Improving the Quality of SPICE Simulation Results with Eldo Premier at ST.


ST does … Read More


SoC Implementation, Sometimes You Need a Plan B

SoC Implementation, Sometimes You Need a Plan B
by Daniel Payne on 02-13-2013 at 11:14 am

I read two blogs this week that got me to thinking about contingencies in SoC implementation. By contingency I mean using an EDA tool flow from the leading vendor for logic synthesis and then discovering that you cannot route the design without expanding the die size after a few weeks of concerted effort, then having to come up with… Read More