Bluetooth has been very successful for many years, but arguably trapped in a niche, at least for us consumers, as a short-range wireless alternative to a wire connection – to connect your phone to a car or speakers for example. (In fairness I should add that the 4.2 version has improved range and Bluetooth has already become quite … Read More
Reducing the Cost of SoC Testing
Every year certain technology themes appear, like at ITC this year a big theme was how to reduce the cost of SoC testing. I spoke with Rob Knoth of Cadence by phone to hear more about this cost of test theme. Rob gave me an example of an SoC that takes 27 seconds on a tester, so at $0.04 per second in test costs amounts to $1.08 per part. If you… Read More
Cadence Design Secures Photonic Beachhead
I had the privilege to attend a five-day PIC (photonic integrated circuit) training hosted by 7-Penniesand Tektronix in San Jose, CA this week. This training was quite comprehensive and covered photonic materials and platforms, design automation, fabrication, packaging and test. It also included invited talks from photonic… Read More
System-level Design for IoT and Automotive
Several years ago a former EDA co-worker went to work for MathWorks, so I started paying a lot more attention to this privately held company that is well known for the MATLAB language and analysis environment. Engineers at MathWorks have created a graphical environment called Simulink for both simulation and model-based design… Read More
Automotive Semiconductor Safety
One of the more telling trends in the semiconductor industry is the “fabless systems companies” transformation. Systems companies that used to buy chips are now making their own to better control the system they are designing: from the chip, package, PCB, the complete system. Apple is the best example as they are now one of the most… Read More
Protium for the win in software development
Cadence Design Systems is a long-standing provider in hardware emulation, but a relative newcomer to FPGA-based prototyping. In an upcoming lunch and learn session on November 11 in San Jose, Cadence teams will be outlining their productivity strategy. What’s different with their approach and why is this worth a lunch?… Read More
Fabless Photonic Design Flow Takes Shape as Cadence teams up with Lumerical and PhoeniX
This week Cadence Design, Lumerical Solutions and PhoeniX Software hosted a two-day photonic summit and workshop. The first day had nearly 100 registered participants and featured industry leaders from Global Foundries, UCSB, MIT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, General Electric, Boeing, Rockley Photonics, and Juniper Networks… Read More
The Fabless Empire Strikes Back, Global Foundries and Cadence make moves into Integrated Photonics!
In August I wrote an article proclaiming Score 1 for IDMs vs Fabless and discussedIntel’sannouncement of volume production of their 100G PSM4 and 100G CWDM4 transceiver products.
This week the Fabless Empire strikes back.Daniel Nenni and I attended a two-day Photonic Summit and workshop hosted by Cadence Design, PhoeniX Software… Read More
You’re Going to Want to Attend the Cadence Photonics Summit Workshop, October 19-20
Photonics IC’s (PIC’s) are used to transmit and receive data through a (single-mode or multi-mode) optical fiber carrier, and provide the requisite electro-optical conversion for system integration. The architecture of the PIC spans the full characteristics of data transmission and reception:
- light generation
Typically,… Read More
"Rigid-Flex Design is Coming"
Printed circuit boards that incorporate a combination of traditional PCB technology with flexible substrates, aka rigid-flex designs, have enabled an increasing variety of product designs, that leverage the unique physical form factor and lightweight options that rigid-flex technology offers. Yet, this technology requires… Read More
