From a consumer viewpoint I want the longest battery life from my electronic devices: iPad tablet, Galaxy Note 4 smart phone, Garmin Edge 820 bike computer, and Amazon Kindle book reader. In September I blogged about RTL Design Restructuring and how it could help achieve lower power, and this month I’m looking forward to … Read More
RTL Design Restructuring Explained
Modern SoC designs can use billions of transistors where transistors are grouped into gates, then gates grouped into cells, then cells grouped into blocks, blocks grouped into modules, and so on, creating a complex hierarchy. What a front-end designer conceives of logically for a hierarchy will differ from how an optimized physical… Read More
A Versatile Design Platform with Multi-Language APIs
In one of my whitepapers “SoCs in New Context – Look beyond PPA”, I had mentioned about several considerations which have become very important in addition to power, performance, and area (PPA) of an SoC. This whitepaper was also posted in parts as blogs on Semiwiki (links are mentioned below). Two important… Read More
A Brief History of Defacto Technologies
In early 2000s, semiconductor design at RTL level was gaining momentum. The idea was to process more design steps such as insertion of test and other design structures upfront at the RTL level. The design optimization and verification were to be done at the RTL level to reduce long iterations through gate level design because changes… Read More