Everyone saw Shift Left, the EDA blockbuster. Digital logic design, with perfect 1s and 0s simulated through perfect switches, shifted into a higher gear. But the dark arts – RF systems, power supplies, and high-speed digital – didn’t shift smoothly. What do these practitioners need in EDA to see more benefits from shift left? … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Synopsys Announces FlexEDA for the Cloud!
There’s been a lot of discussion and hype regarding use of the cloud for chip design for quite a while, more than ten years I would say. I spoke with Synopsys to better understand their recent Synopsys Cloud announcement to determine if it is different. Briefly, it is different, and here is why:
If you’re trying to design a complex SoC,… Read More
Symbolic Trojan Detection. Innovation in Verification
We normally test only for correctness of the functionality we expect. How can we find functionality (e.g. Trojans) that we don’t expect? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always,… Read More
Path Based UPF Strategies Explained
The development of the Unified Power Format (UPF) was spurred on by the need for explicit ways to enable specification and verification of power management aspects of SoC designs. The origins of UPF date back to its first release in 2007. Prior to that several vendors had their own methods of specifying power management aspects … Read More
WEBINAR: Overcome Aging Issues in Clocks at Sub-10nm Designs
We all know that designers work hard to reach design closure on SOC designs. However, what gets less attention from consumers is the effort that goes into ensuring that these chips will be fully operational and meeting timing specs over their projected lifetime. Of course, this is less important for chips used in devices with projected… Read More
Webinar: Simulate Trimming for Circuit Quality of Smart IC Design
Advanced semiconductor nanometer technology nodes, together with smart IC design applications enable today very complex and powerful systems for communication, automotive, data transmission, AI, IoT, medical, industry, energy harvesting, and many more.
However, more aggressive time-to-market and higher performance… Read More
Co-Developing IP and SoC Bring Up Firmware with PSS
With ever challenging time to market requirements, co-developing IP and firmware is imperative for all system development projects. But that doesn’t make the task any easier. Depending on the complexity of the system being developed, the task gets tougher. For example, different pieces of IP may be the output of various teams… Read More
Webinar Series: Learn the Foundation of Computational Electromagnetics
The electromagnetism problems upon which we spent many hours laboring away on homework in college has a mathematical formulation originally developed by Maxwell, Lorentz, Gauss, Faraday and others. In their full forms, these formulas are partial differential equations that come in many versions – both differential and integral.… Read More
5G and Aircraft Safety: Simulation is Key to Ensuring Passenger Safety – Part 4
In our previous blog installments, we examined the ingredient for modeling the potential for interference between a 5G C-band base station and an aviation radar altimeter. Using candidate emissions models for the transmitter, wideband susceptibility models for a candidate radar altimeter receiver and antenna and propagation… Read More
Balancing Test Requirements with SOC Security
Typically, there is an existential rift between the on-chip access requirements for test and the need for security in SoCs. Using traditional deterministic scan techniques has meant opening up full read and write access to the flops in a design through the scan chains. Having this kind of access easily defeats the best designed… Read More


Intel: Pushing EMIB Forward: Design Methodology Insights with Synopsys Tools