DVCon: Formal Verification with lunch

DVCon: Formal Verification with lunch
by Paul McLellan on 02-03-2012 at 6:03 pm

At DVCon on Thursday March 1st (St David’s day for any Welsh readers) Jasper is sponsoring lunch from 12pm to 1.30pm. It will take place in the Cascade/Sierra ballrooms.

During lunch there will be a panel discussion Formal Verification from Users’ Perspectives with real users no how they mitigate risk in their designs… Read More


3D Standards

3D Standards
by Paul McLellan on 02-01-2012 at 5:06 pm

At DesignCon this week there was a panel on 3D standards organized by Si2. I also talked to Aveek Sarkar of Apache (a subsidiary of Ansys) who is one of the founding member companies of the Si2 Open3D Technical Advisory Board (TAB), along with Atrenta, Cadence, Fraunhofer Institute, Global Foundries, Intel, Invarian, Mentor, Qualcomm,… Read More


Power Issues for Chip and Board

Power Issues for Chip and Board
by Paul McLellan on 01-29-2012 at 3:39 pm

Next week there are two Apache, a subsidiary of Ansys, events. At DesignCon there are a couple of workshops on chip-package-system (CPS). In addition to Apache themselves, each of the two workshops has a number of representatives of leading edge companies doing semiconductor design. I already blogged about this in more detail… Read More


Apple blows away their numbers

Apple blows away their numbers
by Paul McLellan on 01-24-2012 at 11:38 pm

Well it looks like everyone (including me) was way too conservative about Apple’s iPhone sales last quarter. Analysts were expecting Apple to sell 30M iPhones and 13M iPads. In fact they sold 37M iPhones, almost a quarter more than expected, and over 15M iPads. In fact Apple sold more iPads than HP, the largest PC manufacturer,… Read More


Going up…3D IC design tools

Going up…3D IC design tools
by Paul McLellan on 01-23-2012 at 6:41 pm

3D and 2.5D (silicon interposer) designs create new challenges for EDA. Not all of them are in the most obvious areas. Mentor has an interesting presentation on what is required for verification and testing of these types of designs. Obviously it is somewhat Mentor-centric but in laying out the challenges it is pretty much agnostic.… Read More


Acquiring Great Power

Acquiring Great Power
by Paul McLellan on 01-20-2012 at 5:11 pm

“Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Making good architectural decisions for controlling power consumption and ensuring power integrity requires a good analysis of the current requirements and how they vary. Low power designs, and today there really aren’t… Read More


Apple 4S nearly catches up to Android, perhaps

Apple 4S nearly catches up to Android, perhaps
by Paul McLellan on 01-19-2012 at 4:00 am

Apple’s iPhone did well in Q4 according to Neilsen who polled recent buyers of smartphones. Of people who had purchased a smartphone in the previous 3 months (roughly Q4) 44.5% chose an iPhone (up from 25.1% in October, roughly Q3). But Android retained the lead with a 46.9% share, down from 61.6% in October. How many phones… Read More


Addressing the Challenges of Tomorrow’s SoC Design

Addressing the Challenges of Tomorrow’s SoC Design
by Paul McLellan on 01-17-2012 at 5:28 pm

For the next few days Atrenta is running a series of 30 minute live webinars to discuss the new solutions and approaches that are required to improve the way SoC designs are created and modified.

The webinars are at the following times:

  • Jan 17th, 7-7.30am PST (sorry you missed that one)
  • January 18th 7.30-8pm PST (and January 19th in
Read More

Chip-Package-System workshops

Chip-Package-System workshops
by Paul McLellan on 01-17-2012 at 4:30 pm

Chips, packages and circuit boards (systems, hence CPS) used to be three separate domains with their own tools that barely interacted at all. If you were lucky, reassigning a pin on a package wouldn’t have to be done manually in all 3 places. But now, from a signal integrity, noise, power point of view these three domains must… Read More


#49 Design Automation Conference Deadlines

#49 Design Automation Conference Deadlines
by Paul McLellan on 01-14-2012 at 10:53 pm

Note that there are several DAC deadlines coming up in the next couple of weeks.

The deadline for user track submissions is January 17th (next Tuesday). Submission requires an extended abstract. See here for details.

The deadline for DAC workshops is January 19th (next Thursday). A proposal is required. See here for details.

The… Read More