Analog design seems to suffer from a huge gap when it comes to testing and verification. While some of this gap is natural – after all, often the only way to verify whether a particular design is working is to look at actual simulation waveforms – it still seems like a lot can be done to bring process into this sphere of the… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
An AMS Seminar on May 16th
Analog and Mixed-Signal (AMS) designers are facing more challenges than ever, so where can they go to get some relief? One place is a half-day seminar scheduled for May 16th in Bridgewater, New Jersey. SemiWiki has teamed up with Tanner EDA, Abbot Labs and SoftMEMS to present topics of:
- True collaborative design enabled through
A Programmable Electrical Rule Checker
IC designers involved with physical design are familiar with acronyms like DRC (Design Rule Check), LVS (Layout Versus Schematic) and DFM (Design For Manufacturing), but how would you go about checking for compliance with ESD (Electro Static Discharge) rules? You may be able to kludge something together with your DRC tool and… Read More
Challenges of 20nm IC Design
Designing at the 20nm node is harder than at 28nm, mostly because of the lithography and process variability challenges that in turn require changes to EDA tools and mask making. The attraction of 20nm design is realizing SoCs with 20 billion transistors. Saleem Haider from Synopsys spoke with me last week to review how Synopsys… Read More
10 to 100X faster HDL Simulation Speeds
Speed, capacity, accuracy – these are the three major EDA tool metrics that we pay attention to and that enable us to design and verify an SoC. Talk to any design or verification engineer and ask if they are satisfied with the time that it takes to simulate their latest design, or to verify that it meets spec and is functionally… Read More
Variation-aware IC Design
We’ve blogged before about Layout Dependent Effects (LDE) on SemiWiki and how it further complicates the IC design and layout process, especially at 28nm and lower nodes because the IC layout starts to change the MOS device performance. There’s an interesting webinarfrom Cadence on Variation-aware IC Design, … Read More
Two New TSMC-Cadence Webinars for Advanced Node Design
Foundries and EDA vendors are cooperating at increasing levels of technical intimacy as we head to the 20nm and lower nodes. Cadence has a strong position in the EDA tools used for IC design and layout of custom and AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal) designs. They have created a series of webinars to highlight the design challenges and new… Read More
SoC Power Integrity Challenges
At DAC in 2012 I visited a few dozen EDA companies and blogged 32 articles, however I didn’t get to see what Apache Design (now a subsidiary of ANSYS) had to say. I did have 20 minutes today to watch their latest video on SoC Power Integrity Challenges and decided to share what I learned. If you want to watch the video at Tech Online,… Read More
IC Test Debug at Altera
My background is IC design engineering, so it’s always a delight to talk with another engineer on their chip challenges. Today I spoke by phone with Sucharita Biswas, a Senior Hardware Engineer at Altera involved in IC test debug for FPGA devices.
RTL Restructuring
Hierarchical IC design has been around since the dawn of electronics, and every SoC design today will use hierarchy for both the physical and logical descriptions. During the physical implementation of an SoC you will likely run into EDA tool limits that require a re-structure of the hierarchy. This re-partitioning will cause… Read More
Selling the Forges of the Future: U.S. Report Exposes China’s Reliance on Western Chip Tools