Introduction
Monday morning at DAC I attended the breakfast presentation from Magma, ARM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The 28nm node is ready for business using Magma tools and ARM libraries.
During breakfast I met Karim Arabi, Ph.D. from QualComm. He’s a senior director of engineering in San Diego and wanted to learn more about… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
Sunday Night at DAC
San Diego Arrival
It’s another picture perfect day in San Diego as I arrived and checked into the Hyatt. The view from the 40th floor looked magnificent, with the Convention Center just a few minutes away in the distance:
Registration
Check in at DAC is quite automated and it took only a minute to receive my official badge with… Read More
Cadence Virtuoso 6.1.5 and ClioSoft Hardware Configuration Management – Webinar Review
Introduction
Cadence and ClioSoft made a webinar recently and I’ll summarize what I learned from it.
What’s New from Cadence in Virtuoso 6.1.5
- Back2Basics (28nm rule integration, Skill improved with object-oriented, OASIS support, HTML Publisher, Waveform re-written for better Analog support, smaller Waveform
A New Hierarchical 3D Field Solver
Introduction
3D field solvers produce the most accurate netlists of RC values of your IC layout that can then be used in SPICE circuit simulators however most of these solvers produce a flat netlist which tends to simulate rather slowly. Thankfully several years ago the first hierarchical SPICE tools were offered by Nassda (HSIM… Read More
Shakeup at Mentor Graphics
Reading the title you guessed it right, Mentor Graphics has three new board members today from the slate offered by billionaire activist Carl Icahn:
- José Maria Alapont, chief executive of the auto parts maker Federal-Mogul
- Gary Meyers, a director of the chip maker Exar
- David Schechter, an executive at Mr. Icahn’s investment firm
Two New Platforms for Systems Designers
Introduction
Today Cadence announced at the Embedded Systems Conference something of interest to systems designers.
What’s New?
The Rapid Prototyping Platform and Virtual System Platform are what’s new, and they intend to enable and automate concurrent hardware and software development. I can remember Mentor… Read More
Graphical DRC vs Text-based DRC
Introduction
IC designs go through a layout process and then a verification of that layout to determine if the layout layer width and spacing rules conform to a set of manufacturing design rules. Adhering to the layout rules will ensure that your chip has acceptable yields.
At the 28nm node a typical DRC (Design Rule Check) deck will… Read More
How Avnera uses Hardware Configuration Management with Virtuoso IC Tools
Introduction
Here in the Silicon Forest (Oregon) we have a venture-backed, fabless analog semi company called Avnera that has designed over 10 Analog System on Chips (ASoC). Their chips are used in consumer products for both wireless audio and video applications.
James Rollins is the director of physical design at Avnera… Read More
Transistor-Level Electrical Rule Checking
Introduction
Circuit designers work at the transistor level and strive to get the ultimate in performance, layout density or low power by creating crafty circuit topologies in both schematics and layout. Along with this quest comes the daunting task of verifying that all of your rules and best practices about reliability have… Read More
Who Needs a 3D Field Solver for IC Design?
Inroduction
In the early days we made paper plots of an IC layout then measured the width and length of interconnect segments with a ruler to add up all of the squares, then multiplied by the resistance per square. It was tedious, error prone and took way too much time, but we were rewarded with accurate parasitic values for our SPICE… Read More







AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification