I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting at lunch with good friend Scott Santandrea, explaining my struggles to get traction with the sales channel for the Analog to Digital Converter product line I was managing. My business line had been spending a lot of resources developing high-performance 24-bit delta sigma and 20-bit
Electronic Design Automation
2020 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification
Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I launched our series on Innovation in Verification at the beginning of last year. We wanted to explore basic innovations and new directions researchers are taking for hardware and system verification. Even we were surprised to find how rich a seam we had tapped. We plan… Read More
Automotive SoCs Need Reset Domain Crossing Checks
When the number of clock domain crossings (CDCs) in SoCs proliferated it readily became apparent that traditional verification methods were not well suited to ensuring that they were properly handled in the design. This led to the creation of new methods and tools to check for correct interfaces between domains. Now, in automotive… Read More
Siemens EDA is Applying Machine Learning to Back-End Wafer Processing Simulation
There’s a lot to unpack in the title of this post. First, Siemens EDA is the new name for Mentor, a Siemens Business. The organization continues to operate as part of Siemens Digital Industries Software. The organization has released a white paper that describes research done with the American University of Armenia. The work examines… Read More
HFSS – A History of Electromagnetic Simulation Innovation
In the 155 years since James Clerk Maxwell introduced the world to Maxwell’s Equations in the “Dynamic Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” there have been some amazing breakthroughs and avenues of insight. As a young electrical engineering student, we are introduced to the set of equations describing electromagnetic waves,… Read More
Developing Drivers For The Automotive Industry
Autonomous driving, connected vehicles, power electronics, infotainment and shared mobility are some of the developments which have mobilized the revolution within the automotive industry in recent years. Combined, they are not only disrupting the automotive value chain and impacting all stakeholders involved but are … Read More
CDC, Low Power Verification. Mentor and Cypress Perspective
Clock domain crossing (CDC) analysis is unavoidable in any modern SoC design and is challenging enough to verify in its own right. CDC plus low power management adds more excitement to your verification task. I wrote on this topic for another solution provider last year. This time I want to intro an interesting twist on the problem,… Read More
The Growing Chasm in Electronic System Design
Since the formation of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry in the 1970s, Moore’s law has increased functionality onto a semiconductor die dramatically. In response, EDA tools for semiconductor design have also grown in functionality and the design processes for semiconductors have moved forward at a breakneck… Read More
Conference: Embedded DevOps
The catchy phrase DevOps is defined by Agile advocates as, “The practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.”
I’ve been developing software since the stone ages, which means… Read More
The Coming Evolution in Electronics Design Automation
Electronics design mega-trends have been a transformational force for the world. As shown in blue in Figure 1, the first wave of electronics consisted of centralized computing and the leaders in the field included companies such as IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Wang, and others. Fundamentally, these technologies… Read More
Podcast EP1: Why are Semiconductors so Sexy?