I have participated to a panel during IP-SoC, I must say that “Subsystem IP, myth or Reality” was a great moment. The panel was a mix of mid-size IP vendor (CAST, Sonics), one large EDA (Martin Lund from Cadence), Semiwiki blogger and one large IDM (Peter Hirt from STM) who has very well represented the customer side. And, to make the… Read More
Give me a pair of wires, I’ll give you Ethernet in cars
A very astute gentleman said to me a few years ago that he’d seen a lot of networking technology come and go – Token Ring, FDDI, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand – but the only one that held up over time was Ethernet.… Read More
Cadence sets the Global Standards in VIP for AMBA based SoC
We have shown in Semiwiki how strong Cadence position was in Verification IP (VIP) in a previous post focusing on Interface standards like SuperSpeed USB or PCI Express. But IP based functions are used everywhere in a SoC, not only to interface with the external world, and need to be verified, as well, like for AMBA based functions.… Read More
Electromigration (EM) with an Electrically-Aware IC Design Flow
Electromigration (EM) is a reliability concern for IC designers because a failure in the field could spell disaster as in lost human life or even bankruptcy for a consumer electronics company. In the old days of IC design we would follow a sequential and iterative design process of:… Read More
IBM Tapes Out 14nm ARM Processor on Cadence Flow
An announcement at the ARM conference was of a joint project to tape out an ARM Cortex-M0 in IBM’s 14nm FinFET process. In fact they taped out 3 different versions of the chip using different routing architectures to see the impact on yield.
This was the first 14nm ARM tapeout, it seems. I’m sure Intel has built plenty … Read More
An AMS Reference Flow for Power Management Designs
At DAC in June I visited and blogged about 30+ EDA and Semi IP companies, however I didn’t have time to watch the TowerJazz presentation in the Cadence Theater entitled: AMS Flow for Power Management Designs. Today I watched the 26 minute video and have summarized what I learned in this blog post.… Read More
CDNLive Call For Papers
The Silicon Valley CDNLive, the Cadence user conference, will be on March 12-13th 2013 in Santa Clara. But the heart of CDNLive are customer presentations and the call for papers is now open. The deadline is December 4th (at 5pm PST for people who really like to come down to the wire). At this point only an abstract is required.
There… Read More
Hybrids on BeO then, 3D-IC in silicon now
Once upon a time (since every good story begins that way), I worked on 10kg, 70 mm diameter things that leapt out of tubes and chased after airplanes and helicopters. The electronics for these things were fairly marvelous, in the days when surface mount technology was in its infancy and having reliability problems in some situations.… Read More
Virtuoso Has Twins
Cadence has apparently announced that going forward the Virtuoso environment is going to be split into two and offered as two separate code-streams, the current IC6.x and a new IC12.x. The idea is to introduce a new product with features that were specifically developed for new technologies such as double patterning aware layout… Read More
TSMC dilemma: Cadence, Mentor or Synopsys?
Looking at the Press Release (PR) flow, it was interesting to see how TSMC has solved a communication dilemma. At first, let’s precise that #1 Silicon foundry has to work with each of the big three EDA companies. As a foundry, you don’t want to lose any customer, and then you support every major design flow. Choosing another strategy… Read More