In thinking about automotive electronics safety standards, such as ISO 26262, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that they are in reference to systems such as autonomous driving, which are entering the marketplace. In reality, functional safety in automotive electronics plays a significant role in many well-established automotive… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Useful Skew in Production Flows
The concept of applying useful clock skew to the design of synchronous systems is not new. To date, the application of this design technique has been somewhat limited, as the related methodologies have been rather ad hoc, to be discussed shortly. More recently, the ability to leverage useful skew has seen a major improvement,… Read More
Another Smart EDA Merger Adds RF Tools
Mergers and acquisitions are just a fact of modern business life, so the semiconductor, IP and EDA industries all can benefit, but only when the two companies have complementary products with some actual synergy. Cadence acquired OrCAD back in 1999, adding a Windows-based PCB tool to their product lineup, and here in 2019 some … Read More
The First Must-Have in 5G
If I was asked about must-have needs for 5G, I’d probably talk about massive MIMO and a lot of exotic parallel DSP processing, also perhaps need for new intelligent approaches to link adaptation and intelligent network slicing in the infrastructure. But there’s something that comes before that all that digital cleverness, in … Read More
WEBINAR: Analyzing PowerMOS Devices to Reduce Power Loss and Improve Reliability
The symbol for a PowerMOS device in a converter circuit schematic looks simple enough. However, it belies a great deal of hidden complexity. A single device is actually a huge array of parallel intrinsic devices connected together to act as a single high power device. While their gate lengths are small, as with many other MOS devices,… Read More
Webinar on coping with the complexities of 3D NAND design
In order to beat Moore’s Law NAND Flash memories have moved from a planar topology to 3D construction. This allows for increased memory sized in much the same way a multistory building provides more building square footage on the same size building lot. Just like in building construction, adding a third dimension to the mix increases… Read More
Webinar Recap: IP Security Threats in your SoC
Three years ago my youngest son purchased a $17 smart watch on eBay, but then my oldest son read an article warning about how that watch would sync with your phone, then send all of your contact info to an address in China. My youngest son then wisely turned the watch off, and never used it again. Hackers have been able to spoof and hide … Read More
Webinar Recap: Challenges of Autonomous Vehicle Validation
Autonomous vehicle progress is in the daily news, so it’s quite exciting to watch it develop with the help of SoC design, sensors, actuators and software from engineering teams spanning the entire globe. Tesla vehicles have reached Level 2 autonomy, Audi e-tron is at Level 3, and Waymo nearly at Level 5 with robot taxis being… Read More
MEMS Actuation and the Art of Prototyping
I mentioned a while back that I’m really getting into the role that sensors play in our new hyper-connected world – in the IoT, intelligent cars, homes, cities, industry, utilities, medicine, agriculture, etc, etc. If we can think of a way to sense it and connect it, someone is probably already doing it. But there’s more to … Read More
Mentor unpacks LVS and LVL issues around advanced packaging
Innovations in packaging have played an important role in improving system performance and area utilization. Advances like 2.5D interposers and fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP) have allowed mixed dies to be used in a single package and have dramatically reduced the number of connections that need to go all the way to the… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki