Formal Verification at ARM

Formal Verification at ARM
by Paul McLellan on 12-20-2012 at 4:34 pm

There are two primary microprocessor companies in the world these days: Intel and ARM. Of course there are many others but Intel is dominant on the PC desktop (including Macs) and ARM is dominant in mobile (including tablets).

One of the keynotes at last month’s Jasper User Group (JUG, not the greatest of acronyms) was by Bob… Read More


Double Patterning Tutorial

Double Patterning Tutorial
by Paul McLellan on 12-17-2012 at 4:07 am

Double patterning at 20nm is one of those big unavoidable changes that it is almost impossible to know too much about. Mentor’s David Abercrombie, DFM Program Manager for Calibre, has written a series of articles detailing the multifaceted impacts of double patterning on advanced node design and verification. There is… Read More


Apache/Ansys presents: 3DIC thermal, transmission lines, low frequency analysis

Apache/Ansys presents: 3DIC thermal, transmission lines, low frequency analysis
by Paul McLellan on 12-16-2012 at 10:00 pm

Late in January it is DesignCon at the Santa Clara convention center from January 28th-31st. Details are here.

On Tuesday from 11.05 to 11.45 Apache and Ansys will be presenting on Thermal Co-analysis of 3D IC/packages/system. This is being presented by a whole team of people: Stephen Pan, senior product specialist at ANSYS; Norman… Read More


Apache Presents: ESD analysis

Apache Presents: ESD analysis
by Paul McLellan on 12-13-2012 at 1:15 am

The 26th Conference on VLSI Design will be in Pune, India from January 5th to 10th at the Hyatt Regency. Details on the conference here. Registration here. I happened to be involved in the first of these conferences, which was held in Edinburgh where I was wrapping up my PhD. It was in the considerably less palatial surroundings of … Read More


Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays
by Paul McLellan on 12-10-2012 at 3:00 pm

At times of this year, companies usually get their salespeople to submit the names and addresses of all their customers. They then get an expensive card printed and mail it out. What the recipient does is anyone’s guess, from throwing it straight in the bin to using it to decorate the office.

Atrenta decided to do something … Read More


3D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging

3D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging
by Paul McLellan on 12-10-2012 at 4:00 am

There is obviously a lot going on in 3D IC these days. And I don’t mean at the micro level of FinFETs which is also a way of going vertical. I mean through-silicon-via (TSV) based approaches for either stacking die or putting them on an interposer. Increasingly the question is no longer if this technology will be viable (there… Read More


Double Patterning Verification

Double Patterning Verification
by Paul McLellan on 12-10-2012 at 3:03 am

You can’t have failed to notice that 20nm is coming. There are a huge number of things that are different about 20nm from 28nm, but far and away the biggest is the need for double patterning. You probably know what this is by now, but just in case, here is a quick summary.

Lithography is done using 193nm light. Today we use immersion… Read More


Apache Power Artist Capabilities II

Apache Power Artist Capabilities II
by Paul McLellan on 12-09-2012 at 4:00 pm

This is the second part of my discussion with Paul Traynar, Apache’s PowerArtist guru. The first part discussed sequential reduction capabilities. Part I was here.

There are two big challenges with doing power analysis at the RTL level. Firstly, how do you get an accurate enough model of what the design will dissipate given… Read More


Apache Power Artist Capabilities I

Apache Power Artist Capabilities I
by Paul McLellan on 12-06-2012 at 2:05 pm

I sat down last week with Paul Traynar who was over from UK. He is Apache’s PowerArtist guru. The first thing we talked about was PowerArtist’s sequential power reduction capabilities.

Forward propagation of enables means that when a register is clock gated and feeds a downstream register then that register can be… Read More


Microprocessor Test and Verification 2012

Microprocessor Test and Verification 2012
by Paul McLellan on 12-05-2012 at 5:43 pm

Next week December 10-12th is the Microprocessor Test and Verification (MTV 2012) which is in Austin Texas (as DAC will be next year, of course). After lunch on Monday there is a panel session on the effectiveness of virtual prototyping entitled When simulation suffices, who needs FPGA or emulation? Bill Neifert, the CTO of Carbon… Read More