Mostly I blog about EDA software however the end objective of IC design is to produce an electronic system like the Kindle Touch, a popular e-book reader from Amazon introduced in late 2011.
Tear Down
This particular model has the following components (Source: Tech Republic):
Author: Daniel Payne
What Dolpin Technology Uses for SPICE Circuit Simulation of IP
Mo Tamjidi founded two Semiconductor IP companies Virage Logic and Dolphin Technology. After reading a press release about how Dolphin Technology is using FineSIM SPICE from Magma I decided to contact him and learn more about why they are now using that circuit simulator in the design of their memory, standard cells, and IO cells.… Read More
EDA Vendors Providing Secure Remote Support for an IC Design Flow
In my last corporate EDA job I had customers in Korea that were evaluating a new circuit simulator and getting strange results. When I asked, “Could you send me your test case?” the reply was always, “No, we cannot let any of our IC design data leave the building because of security concerns.”… Read More
View from the top: Joe Sawicki
Joe Sawicki is the VP and General Manager at Mentor Graphics for the Design-to-Silicon Division where the Calibre product line is developed. We met today in Wilsonville, Oregon to review the challenges in IC design, processing and manufacturing.… Read More
Clock Design for SOCs with Lower Power and Better Specs
Dan Ganousis posted in our SemiWiki forums about a newer technique to lower the power consumed by GHz clocks on SOC designs and asked if I was interested to learn more, so we met today via WebEx. Dan is with a company called Cyclos Semiconductor, co-founded in 2006 by Marios Papaefthymiou, President and Alexander Ishii, VP of Engineering.… Read More
MEMS layout and automation
At a webinar today I listened and learned about how a tool called L-Edit can be used to layout MEMS designs plus automate the task to be more productive. I can see how the history of IC layout editing is now being repeated with MEMS because in the earliest IC layout tools we could only do manual entry of polygons, then gradually we got cells… Read More
Learning About MEMS
My automobile has an air bag system that uses a MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) sensor to tell it when to deploy, and I’ve read headlines talking about MEMS over the years so I decided it was about time to learn more by attending a Webinar on Wednesday, December 14th at 8AM Pacific Time.
The EDA company hosting the Webinar… Read More
How Fast (and accurate) is Your SPICE Circuit Simulator?
In my dad’s generation they tweaked cars to become hotrods while in EDA today we have companies that tweak SPICE circuit simulators to become crowned speed champions. The perennial question though is, “How fast and accurate is my SPICE circuit simulator?”… Read More
Methodics can Now use www.methodics.com after Domain Name Battle in EDA
Imagine trying to run your EDA business only to have a competitor squat on your domain name and then make disparaging remarks about you. This sounds like a match made for reality TV however it is quite real, and now this chapter in EDA has a happy ending because Methodics can use www.methodics.com as their domain name.
The Bad Guy
We’ve… Read More
EDA mergers: Accelicon acquired by Agilent
Agilent acquired EEsof back in 1999, now the EEsof group acquired Accelicon on December 1, 2011. The terms of the deal are not disclosed.
SPICE circuit simulators are only as accurate as their models and algorithms. On the model side we have Accelicon that provides EDA tools to create SPICE models based on silicon measurements:… Read More
Intel’s Path to Technological Leadership: Transforming Foundry Services and Embracing AI