Create a panel discussion about analog IC design and reliability and my curiosity is instantly piqued, so I attended a luncheon discussion at #55DAC moderated by Steven Lewis of Cadence. The panelists were quite deep in their specialized fields:… Read More
A True Signoff for 7nm and Beyond
The Tale of Three Metrics
Meeting PPA (Performance, Power and Area) target is key to a successful design tapeout. These mainstream QoR (Quality of Results) metrics are rather empirical yet inter-correlated and have been expanded to be linked with other metrics such as yield, cost and reliability. While the recent CPU performance… Read More
Cadence Update on AMS Design and Verification at #55DAC
As a blogger in the EDA industry I get more invitations to meet with folks at DAC than I have time slots, so I have to be a bit selective in who I meet. When the folks at Cadence asked me to sit down and chat with Mladen Nizic I was intrigued because Mladen is so well-known in the AMS language area and he’s one of the authors of, The Mixed-Signal… Read More
An update on the Design Productivity Gap
Over a decade ago, a group of semiconductor industry experts published a landmark paper as part of the periodic updates to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, or ITRS for short (link). The ITRS identified a critical design productivity gap. The circuit capacity afforded by the Moore’s Law pace of technology… Read More
Accelerating the PCB Design-Analysis Optimization Loop
With the increasing complexity and diversity of the mechanical constraints and electrical requirements in electronic product development, printed circuit board designers are faced with a number of difficult challenges:
- generating accurate (S-parameter) simulation models for critical interface elements of the design
Verification Importance in Academia
“Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence,” stated the famous computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. That notion rings true to the many college participants of the Hack@DAC competition offered during DAC 2018 in San Francisco. The goal of this competition is to develop tools and methods for identifying security… Read More
1-on-1 with Anirudh Devgan, President, Cadence
At the Design Automation Conference, no one is busier than an EDA company executive — conference panels, product launch briefings, customer meetings, and corporate dinners all place considerable demands on their time. I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with Anirudh Devgan, President of Cadence, at the recent DAC55 in San… Read More
Low Cost Power NB-IoT Solution? Fusion F1 DSP based Modem!
Supporting NB-IoT requires low cost (optimized silicon footprint) and ultra-low power solution to cope with IoT device requirement. Cadence Fusion F1 DSP IP has been integrated in modem IC by two new customers, Xinyi and Rafael, gaining traction in NB-IoT market. These design-win builds on previous momentum: software GPS solution… Read More
Cadence Selected to Support Major DARPA Program
When DARPA plans programs, they’re known for going big – really big. Which is what they are doing again with their Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI). Abstracting from their intro, this is a program “to ensure far-reaching improvements in electronics performance well beyond the limits of traditional scaling”. This isn’t… Read More
Cadence’s Smarter and Faster Verification in the Era of Machine Learning, AI, and Big Data Analytics Panel
I attended on Monday, June 25, DAC’s Opening Day, a Cadence-sponsored Lunch panel. Ann Steffora Mutschler (Semiconductor Engineering) was the Moderator and the Panelists were Jim Hogan (Vista Ventures), David Lacey (HP Enterprise), Shigeo Oshima (Toshiba Memory Corp), Paul Cunningham (Cadence).… Read More