One of the perks of blogging here is being able to get a press invitation to lots of events, often in interesting locations I never even knew existed. Tonight it was a Broadcom event in SPUR here in San Francisco. The evening was about the Internet of Things (IoT). Everyone knows that IoT is sort of hype, but it is also a real opportunity.… Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
Mentor: It’s All About Cars
Mentor’s results came out last week. They were good. Wally opened the call:Thanks. Once again results for Mentor Graphics in the quarter exceeded our guidance. Revenue of $260.2 million and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.23, were ahead of our guidance of $250 million and $0.15 earnings per share. Strength in bookings… Read More
Cadence and Reverse Debugging
I wrote back in March about Undo Software. They have a reverse debugging solution called UndoDB (the DB is for debug, not database). I have a soft spot for reverse debugging ever since seeing one of the engineers at Virtutech type reverse single step and seeing the code back up a single instruction and realizing that literally months… Read More
Synopsys Earnings
The perfect quarterly results are to slightly beat the consensus for earnings and profit, and not say anything negative about guidance for the upcoming quarter. Synopsys delivered all that with their latest quarter yesterday. Revenue was $521M versus $483M last year, giving solid growth of over 8%. Non-GAAP earnings per share… Read More
Develop High Performance Machine Vision in the Blink of an Eye
The growing capabilities of silicon along with improved algorithms means that machine vision is becoming increasingly important since more and more systems can be built in such areas as manufacturing, intelligent traffic management, bar code scanning, counterfeit detection and even sports simulation. Is that a 3X driver?… Read More
SEMulator3D: GlobalFoundries Process Variation Reduction
At SEMICON last month, Rohit Pal of GlobalFoundries gave a presentation on their methodology for reducing process variation. It was titled Cpk Based Variation Reduction: 14nm FinFET Technology.
Capability indices such as Cpk is a commonly used technique to assess the variation maturity of a technology. It looks at a given parameter’s… Read More
FD-SOI at 14nm
At the recent Semicon West, Michel Haond of ST Microelectronics had a presentation on 14nm FD-SOI, or what they more lengthily call UTBB FD-SOI (which when you expand it all out comes to Ultra Thin Body and Buried-Oxide Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator). When Chenming Hu (or whoever in his group) came up with the term FinFET it … Read More
Cadence Completes Power Signoff Solution with Voltus-Fi
You probably remember Cadence introduced Voltus towards the end of last year at their signoff summit. This was aimed at digital designers. Prior to that they had announced Tempus, their static timing analysis tool. More recently they announced Quantus QRC extraction. All of these tools that end in -us have been re-architected… Read More
Transaction-based Emulation
Verification has been going through a lot of changes in the last couple of years. Three technologies that used to be largely contained in their own silos have come together: simulation, emulation and virtual-platforms.
Until recently, the workhorse verification tool was simulation. Emulation had its place but limits on capacity… Read More
Smart Meters
The Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t a single homogenous market but splits up into different segments with very different requirements. A lot of IoT markets are still in our future: next generation wearable medical devices, autonomous cars and more. One area where IoT has been going strong, long enough that it probably pre-dates… Read More
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