Webinar on Methods for Monte Carlo and High Sigma Analysis

Webinar on Methods for Monte Carlo and High Sigma Analysis
by Tom Simon on 06-12-2020 at 6:00 am

Advanced Monte Carlo Methods

There is an old saying popularized by Mark Twain that goes “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It turns out that no one can say who originated this saying, yet despite however you might feel about statistics, they play an important role in verifying analog designs. The truth is that there are large numbers… Read More


Webinar Replay – Insight into Creating a Common Testbench

Webinar Replay – Insight into Creating a Common Testbench
by Tom Simon on 06-04-2020 at 6:00 am

Common Tesbanch

These days the verification process starts right when the design process begins, and it keeps going well past the end of the design phase. Simulation is used extensively at every stage of design and can go a long way to help validate a design. However, for many types of designs, especially those that process complex data streams, … Read More


Free Webinar on Verifying On-Chip ESD Protection

Free Webinar on Verifying On-Chip ESD Protection
by Tom Simon on 06-03-2020 at 6:00 am

Promo Ad 400x400 1

Walking across a carpet can generate up to 35,000 volts of static charge, which is tens of thousands of times higher than the operating voltages of most integrated circuits. When charge build up from static electricity is exposed to the pins of an IC, the electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection network on the chip is intended to… Read More


Minimizing Power Consumption in Ultra Low Power MCU Based SoCs

Minimizing Power Consumption in Ultra Low Power MCU Based SoCs
by Tom Simon on 05-29-2020 at 6:00 am

ULP SoC Demand

When it comes to extremely power sensitive applications such as IoT and edge devices, there is literally an arsenal of power saving techniques that could be used. The tricky part is figuring out which ones to use and how to use them for maximum benefit. This is coupled with the need to not hamper device performance or functionality.… Read More


Synopsys Announces IP Supporting 5G’s Game Changing Low Power IoT Spec

Synopsys Announces IP Supporting 5G’s Game Changing Low Power IoT Spec
by Tom Simon on 05-22-2020 at 6:00 am

5G NB IoT Processor from Synopsys

If you are like me, you will get a 5G phone because of the high bandwidth it offers. However, there is a lot more to 5G than just fast data. In fact, one of the appealing features of 5G is low bandwidth communication. This is useful for edge devices that perform infrequent and low volume data transfers and depend on long battery life. Prior… Read More


HCL Offers Tightly Integrated Design Management Solution for Virtuoso

HCL Offers Tightly Integrated Design Management Solution for Virtuoso
by Tom Simon on 05-18-2020 at 6:00 am

Flexium for Virtuoso

The road to a truly usable design management solution for electronic design has been a long and twisty one. Initially just handling EDA tool data was a struggle, let alone addressing mutli-user and multi-site needs. Of course, all along every EDA tool development company was internally using software revision control, which … Read More


High Speed SerDes Design and Simulation Webinar Replay from Mentor

High Speed SerDes Design and Simulation Webinar Replay from Mentor
by Tom Simon on 05-14-2020 at 10:00 am

Mentor SerDes Simulation

Over the years SerDes (serializer/deserializer) based connections have proliferated into just about every connection within and among computing systems. Years ago, parallel interfaces were the most common method of moving data, but issues of signal integrity, synchronization and power simply became too much for the required… Read More


DFT Innovations Come from Customer Partnerships

DFT Innovations Come from Customer Partnerships
by Tom Simon on 05-05-2020 at 10:00 am

Mentro Tessent Innovation

There is an adage that says that quality is not something that can be slapped on at the end of the design or manufacturing process. Ensuring quality requires careful thought throughout development and production. Arguably this adage is more applicable to the topic of Design for Test (DFT) than almost any other area of IC development… Read More


SiFive’s Approach to Embedding Intelligence Everywhere

SiFive’s Approach to Embedding Intelligence Everywhere
by Tom Simon on 04-27-2020 at 6:00 am

SiFive Embedding Intelligence

Before the advent of RISC-V, designers looking for embedded processors were effectively limited to a handful of proprietary processors using ISAs from decades ago. While the major ISAs are being updated and enhanced, they also are facing limitations from many decisions made over many years.  RISC-V was conceived with a clean… Read More


Using ML Acceleration Hardware for Improved DSP Performance

Using ML Acceleration Hardware for Improved DSP Performance
by Tom Simon on 04-24-2020 at 6:00 am

nnMAX Flex Logix Tile

Some amazing hardware is being designed to accelerate AI/ML, most of which features large numbers of MAC units. Given that MAC units are like the lego blocks of digital math, they are also useful for a number of other applications. System designers are waking up to the idea of repurposing AI accelerators for DSP functions such as … Read More