My IC design career started out with DRAM design, characterization and verification back in the 1970’s, so I vividly recall how much SPICE circuit simulation was involved, and how little automation we had back in the day, so we tended to cobble together our own scripts to help automate the process a bit. With each new process… Read More
Extraction Features for 7nm
Frequent Semiwiki readers are familiar with the importance of close collaboration between the foundries and EDA tool developers, to provide the crucial features required by new process nodes. Perhaps the best illustration of the significance of this collaboration is the technical evolution of layout parasitic extraction.… Read More
Overcoming Mixed-Signal Design and Verification Challenges in Automotive and IoT Systems
At the recent DAC conference in Austin I attended a panel discussion over lunch where engineers from four companies talked about how they approached mixed-signal design and verification challenges for automotive and IoT systems. It seems like 2017 was the year of automotive at DAC, while in 2016 it was all about IoT. Both segments… Read More
ARM and Cadence IP Simplify IoT System Design and Verification
As the Internet-of-Things (IoT) markets mature, we are seeing the complexity of IoT systems evolve from simple routing functions that connect IoT edge devices to the cloud into more complex system of systems that manage the interaction between multiple sensor-hubs. IoT sensor-hubs and gateways not only take care of basic care… Read More
Tensilica HiFi 3z DSP Core: Leading Energy Efficiency
Tensilica HiFi DSP family, dedicated to voice and audio processing, is shipping over 1 billion units worldwide annually, thanks to the 75+ licensees. The new HiFi 3z architecture offers more than 1.3X better voice and audio processing performance than its predecessor, the HiFi 3 DSP, which leads the industry in the number of audio… Read More
Virtualizing ICE
The defining characteristic of In-Circuit-Emulation (ICE) has been that the emulator is connected to real circuitry – a storage device perhaps, and PCIe or Ethernet interfaces. The advantage is that you can test your emulated model against real traffic and responses, rather than an interface model which may not fully capture… Read More
Cadence’s Tempus – New Hierarchical Approach for Static Timing Analysis
While at the 54[SUP]th[/SUP] Design Automation Conference (DAC) I had the opportunity to talk with Ruben Molina, Product Management Director for Cadence’s Tempus static timing analysis (STA) tool. This was a good review of how the state-of-the-art for STA has evolved over the last couple decades. While the basic problem hasn’t… Read More
Designing at 7nm with ARM, MediaTek, Renesas, Cadence and TSMC
The bleeding edge of SoC design was on full display last month at DAC in Austin as I listened to a panel session where members talked about their specific experiences so far designing with the 7nm process node. Jim Hogan was the moderator and the panel quickly got into what their respective companies are doing with 7nm technology already.… Read More
Cadence Explores Smarter Verification
Verification as an effectively unbounded problem will always stir debate on ways to improve. A natural response is to put heavy emphasis on making existing methods faster and more seamless. That’s certainly part of continuous improvement but sometimes we also need to step back and ask the bigger questions – what is sufficient … Read More
ADAS and Vision from Cadence
A huge theme at #54DAC this year was all things automotive and in particular the phrase ADAS (Assisted Driver Assistance Systems), so I followed up with Raja Tabet a corporate VP of emerging technology at Cadence. We met on Monday in a press room where I quickly learned that Cadence has been serving the automotive industry for the … Read More