All Things Semiconductor!
In our previous article bearing the same title, we discussed the recommended baseline checks covering cell and pin presence, back-end, and some front-end checks related to functional equivalency. In this article, we’ll cover the extensive list of characterization checks, that include timing arcs, NLDM, CCS, ECSM/EM, and … Read More
IP must be properly qualified before attempting to use them in any IC design flow. One cannot wait to catch issues further down the chip design cycle. Waiting for issues to appear during design verification poses extremely high risks, including schedule slippage. For example, connection errors in transistor bulk terminals where… Read More
This year I signed books in the Fractal booth (compliments of Fractal) and let me tell you it was quite an experience. IP quality is a very touchy subject and the source of many more tape-out delays than I had imagined. As it turns out, commercial IP is the biggest offender which makes no sense to me whatsoever. Even more shocking, one… Read More
In case you missed it, Fractal is now officially part of the TSMC EDA Alliance. Fractal Crossfire is the leading IP and Library QA tool used by TSMC and many of TSMC’s customers so this is for the greater IP good, absolutely. Fractal has also released a new white paper “Setup Generation for Fractal Crossfire” that we can talk about but… Read More
We just completed a run through of the upcoming IP & Library QA webinar that I am moderating with Fractal and let me tell you it is a must see for management level Semiconductor Design and Semiconductor IP companies as well as the Foundries. Seriously, if you are an IP company you had better be up on the latest QA checks if you want … Read More
Improper handling of design validation could simply translate into a debugging exercise. In mainstream RTL2GDS flow, design implementation involves a top-level integration and lower-level block developments. These lower-level components, comprising of macros, IPs and standard cells are subjected to frequent abstraction… Read More
We (SemiWiki) have been working with Fractal for close to five years now publishing 25 blogs that have garnered more than 100,000 views. Generally speaking QA people are seen as the unsung heroes of EDA since the only time you really hear about them is when something goes wrong and a tapeout is delayed or a chip is respun.
FinFETs really… Read More
You don’t shower only before you have to go to an important meeting (teenagers excepted). Surgical teams go further, demanding a strict regimen of hygiene be followed before anyone is allowed into an operating room. Yet we tend to assume that libraries and physical IP (analog, memories, other physical blocks) are checked and pronounced… Read More
A few years ago, I started looking at data visualization methods as a way to make sense of large quantities of complex data. This is a technique that has become very popular in big data analytics where it is effectively impossible to see patterns in data in any other way. There are vast numbers of different types of diagram – treemap,… Read More
When your design doesn’t work, who owns that problem? I don’t believe the answer to this question has changed significantly since semiconductor design started, despite distributed sourcing for IP and manufacturing. Some things like yield can (sometimes) be pushed back to the foundry, but mostly the design company owns the problem.… Read More
