Managing Differences with Schematic-Based IC Design

Managing Differences with Schematic-Based IC Design
by Daniel Payne on 07-02-2012 at 2:41 pm

At DAC in June I didn’t get a chance to visit ClioSoft for a product update so instead I read their white paper this week, “The Power of Visual Diff for Schematics & Layouts“. My background is transistor-level IC design so anything with schematics is familiar and interesting.

The Challenge
Hand-crafted … Read More


Robustness, Reliability and Yield at DAC

Robustness, Reliability and Yield at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-26-2012 at 8:15 pm

On Wednesday at DAC I met with Bob Slee, distributor and Michael Siu, AE for MunEDA to get an update on what’s new. MunEDA has EDA software for:

  • Schematic porting
  • Nominal circuit analysis
  • Nominal circuit optimization
  • Statistical circuit analysis
  • Statistical circuit optimization
  • IP porting
  • Circuit model generation
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AMS Simulation Update from Mentor Graphics at DAC

AMS Simulation Update from Mentor Graphics at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-25-2012 at 12:36 pm

I met with Jay Madiraju of Mentor Graphics on Wednesday at DAC to get an update on their AMS simulation products. We worked together at Mentor back when Mach TA was being developed as a Fast SPICE circuit simulator.… Read More


FinFET Standard Cells at DAC

FinFET Standard Cells at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-25-2012 at 11:45 am

Rajiv Bhateja, Dhrumil Gandhi and Neal Carney met with me at DAC on Wednesday to give an update on what’s new in 2012 for Tela Innovations, a provider of lithography optimized IP and tools. This team has a rich history in EDA and IP from companies like: ARM, Artisan, Mentor Graphics and Silicon Compilers.… Read More


Finding RTL Bugs Live Using Formal Techniques

Finding RTL Bugs Live Using Formal Techniques
by Daniel Payne on 06-24-2012 at 8:10 pm

Most of what you see at DAC is canned PowerPoint presentations, however on Tuesday afternoon I spotted a company called Oski Technology that was doing something almost unheard of – they had an engineer debugging a digital design from Nvidia using formal tools live. I later found out the engineer found 4 bugs in just three days… Read More


DesignSync update from Dassault Systems at DAC

DesignSync update from Dassault Systems at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-24-2012 at 8:10 pm

At DAC on Wednesday Rick Stanton of Dassault Systems gave me an update on what’s new with DesignSync, a design data management tool offered since 1998. Rick and I both worked at Viewlogic in the 90’s along with Dennis Harmon who then founded Synchronicity, later acquired by Dassault Systems.… Read More