Last month Brian Bailey at EDN moderated an interesting webinar about power issues. Unusually, it combined two different domains: doing things by modeling and actually taking measurements off real chips and boards. The two participants were Arvind Shanmugavel from the Apache subsidiary of Ansys, and Randy White from Tektronix.… Read More
Power to the Drones
Unmanned systems are becoming indispensable to military forces and are used across all of land, sea and air. The generic name for such unmanned systems is UXS, usually UAS (air), UGS (ground) or UUS (underwater). The UAS is the most visible, both due to military strikes and the views of Japan after the Tsunami when areas were unreachable… Read More
3D Standards
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
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
Acquiring Great Power
“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
Chip-Package-System workshops
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
Challenges in 3D-IC and 2½D Design
3D IC design and what has come to be known as 2½D IC design, with active die on a silicon interposer, require new approaches to verification since the through silicon vias (TSVs) and the fact that several different semiconductor processes may be involved create a new set of design challenges
The power delivery network is a challenge… Read More
RTL Power Models
One of the challenges of doing a design in the 28nm world is that everything depends on everything else. But some decisions need to be made early with imperfect information. But the better the information we have, the better those early decisions will be. One area of particular importance is selecting a package, designing a power… Read More
Noise Coupling
One of the challenges of designing a modern SoC is that the digital parts of the circuit are really something that in an ideal world you’d keep as far away from the analog as possible. The digital parts of the circuit generate large amounts of noise, especially in the power supply and in the substrate, two areas where it is impossible… Read More
Apache on the Road
There are lots of places that Apache is going to popping up in the next few weeks.
Firstly, Andrew Yang will deliver the keynote on October 24th at the Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (EPEPS) in San Jose. He will be talking about “Chip-Package-System convergence: bridging multiple disciplings… Read More