Matt Elmore of ANSYS/Apache has an interesting blog posting about thermal analysis in 3D integrated circuits. With both technical and economic challenges at process nodes as we push below 28nm, increasingly product groups are looking towards through-silicon-via (TSV) based approaches as a way of keeping Moore’s law… Read More
Apache Low Power Webinars
For those of you who didn’t get to DAC you can catch up on low power issues with Apache’s series of low-power webinars taking place late in July. All webinars are at 11am Pacific Time. Full details and registration on the Apache website here.… Read More
TSMC Theater Presentation: Apache
At the TSMC Theater Apache (don’t forget, now a subsidary of Ansys) talked about Emerging Challenges for Power, Signal and Reliability Verification on 3D-IC and Silicon Interposer Designs. The more I see about the costs and challenges of 20/22nm and below, the more I think that these 3D and 2.5D approaches are going to be … Read More
Apache Ansys Update 2012
Apache is one of the brightest stars in the EDA universe. Paul McLellan has done a nice job covering them before and after the Ansys acquisition. Check out the Apache SemiWiki landing page HERE. The Apache wikis are also very well done and it has been a pleasure working with the Apache marketing team. Expect more innovative things … Read More
Customers Talk About Reliability, Low-Power and 3D
At DAC in San Francisco this year, Apache once again have a mixture of presentations by customers on their use of Apache tools and presentations by Apache themselves on their products. Most of the customer presentations are given just once, but the product presentations are given multiple times over the three days.
I think one of… Read More
RedHawk: On to the Future
For many, maybe most, big designs, Apache’s RedHawk is the signoff tool for analyzing issues around power: electromigration, power supply droop, noise, transients and so on. But the latest designs have some issues: they are enormous (so you can’t just analyze them naively any more than you can run a Spice simulation… Read More
Designing for Reliability
Analyzing the operation of a modern SoC, especially analyzing its power distribution network (PDN) is getting more and more complex. Today’s SoCs no longer operate on a continuous basis, instead functional blocks on the IC are only powered up to execute the operation that is required and then they go into a standby mode, … Read More
Power Issues for Chip and Board: webinar
Last month Brian Bailey at EDN moderated an interesting webinar about power issues. Unusually, it combined two different domains: doing things by modeling and actually taking measurements off real chips and boards. The two participants were Arvind Shanmugavel from the Apache subsidiary of Ansys, and Randy White from Tektronix.… Read More
Power to the Drones
Unmanned systems are becoming indispensable to military forces and are used across all of land, sea and air. The generic name for such unmanned systems is UXS, usually UAS (air), UGS (ground) or UUS (underwater). The UAS is the most visible, both due to military strikes and the views of Japan after the Tsunami when areas were unreachable… Read More
3D Standards
At DesignCon this week there was a panel on 3D standards organized by Si2. I also talked to Aveek Sarkar of Apache (a subsidiary of Ansys) who is one of the founding member companies of the Si2 Open3D Technical Advisory Board (TAB), along with Atrenta, Cadence, Fraunhofer Institute, Global Foundries, Intel, Invarian, Mentor, Qualcomm,… Read More