It’s been 34 years since I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Electrical Engineering so I was curious about what has changed in quantum physics since then. Alastair Rae is the UK-based author who wrote the book – Quantum Physics: A Beginner’s Guide. I read this on my Kindle Touch e-book… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
IC Reliability and Prevention During Design with EDA Tools
IC device physics uncovers limits to reliable operation, so IC designers are learning to first identify and then fix reliability issues prior to tape-out. Here’ s a list of reliability issues to keep you awake at night:… Read More
AMS Design using Co-Simulation
The big three vendors in EDA offer AMS simulation tools but what about simulation choices from other EDA vendors?
It turns out there are two privately held EDA companies that have done business since the 1980’s and have just integrated a Verilog A simulator with a SPICE circuit simulator. The two companies are Aldec with a … Read More
Milestones to Building a Successful Technology Software Company
Join us on May 31, 2012 for the first in a series of conversations exploring concepts and best practices for emerging companies. The first conversation will outline the critical milestones which must be conquered to take a start-up from early stages to a strong, growing, sustainable… Read More
Analog Circuit Optimization
Gim Tan at Magma did a webinar on analog circuit optimization, so I watched it today to see what I could learn about their approach. Gim is a Staff AE, so not much marketing fluff to wade through in this webinar.
The old way of designing custom analog circuits involves many tedious and error prone iterations between front-end (Schematic… Read More
Changing your IC Layout Methodology to Manage Layout Dependent Effects (LDE)
Smaller IC nodes bring new challenges to the art of IC layout for AMS designs, like Layout Dependent Effects (LDE). If your custom IC design flow looks like the diagram below then you’re in for many time-consuming iterations because where you place each transistor will impact the actual Vt and Idsat values, which are now a … Read More
Soft Error Rate (SER) Prediction Software for IC Design
My first IC design in 1978 was a 16Kb DRAM chip at Intel and our researchers discovered the strange failure of Soft Errors caused by Alpha particles in the packaging and neutron particles which are more prominent at higher altitudes like in Denver, Colorado. Before today if you wanted to know the Soft Error Rate (SER) you had to fabricate… Read More
MEMS and IC Co-design
This morning I attended a webinar about MEMS and IC co-design from a company called SoftMEMS along with Tanner EDA. I learned that you can co-design MEMS and IC either in a bottom-up or top-down methodology, and that this particular flow has import/export options to fit in with your mechanical simulation tools (Ansys, Comsol, Open… Read More
EDA Industry Talks about Smart Phones and Tablets, Yet Their Own Web Sites are Not Mobile-friendly
As a blogger I write weekly about the EDA industry and certainly our industry enables products like Smart Phones and Tablets to even exist, however if we really believed in these mobile devices then what should our web sites look like on a mobile device?
It’s a simple question, yet I first must define mobile-friendly before… Read More
How Co-design of MEMS-IC Saves Time
I learned about MEMS layout automation at a webinar in December and plan to attend another webinar next week on April 10thwhere two companies have created a MEMS-IC co-design flow, Tanner EDA and SoftMEMS. The big challenge is to ensure that the MEMS and electronic parts of a new design will simulate correctly before committing … Read More
Unlocking the cloud: A new era for post-tapeout flow for semiconductor manufacturing