Siemens Mentor recently announced PAVE360™, a very cool comprehensive pre silicon simulation environment. Autonomous cars are very popular here in Silicon Valley and quite safe on the highways since the average speed is 25mph (horrible traffic). In the city you need autonomous parking unless you want to waste precious time … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
The New Silvaco CEO is SURGING!
One of my great pleasures in the semiconductor industry is meeting the people who have brought us to where we are today, at the forefront of modern life. One of those people is Babak Taheri, now CEO of Silvaco who I spent time with yesterday. Babak started in semiconductors around the same time I did 30+ years ago. He has a PhD in EECS and… Read More
Virtualizing 5G Infrastructure Verification
Mentor have pushed the advantages of virtualized verification in a number of domains, initially in verifying advanced networking devices supporting multiple protocols and software-defined networking (SDN), and more recently for SSD controllers, particularly in large storage systems for data centers. There are two important… Read More
Optimizing High Performance Packages calls for Multidisciplinary 3D Modeling
For all the time we spend thinking and talking about silicon design, it’s easy to forget just how important package design is. Semiconductor packages have evolved over the years from very basic containers for ICs into very specialized and highly engineered elements of finished electronic systems. They play an important role … Read More
Automating Timing Arc Prediction for AMS IP using ML
NVIDIA designs some of the most complex chips for GPU and AI applications these days, with SoCs exceeding 21 billion transistors. They certainly know how to push the limits of all EDA tools, and they have a strong motivation to automate more manual tasks in order to quicken their time to market. I missed their Designer/IP Track Poster… Read More
Cadence and Green Hills Share More Security Thoughts at ARM Techcon
On Wednesday, October 9, 2019, I had the pleasure of spending the day at ARM Techcon at the San Jose Convention Center. In the morning, in addition to getting some sneak peeks into the exhibitor area, I attended some of the morning keynote presentations, which focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) topics.… Read More
Formal in the Field: Users are Getting More Sophisticated
Building on an old chestnut, if sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic, there are a number of technology users who are increasingly looking like magicians. Of course when it comes to formal, neither is magical, just very clever. The technology continues to advance and so do the users in their application of those methods.… Read More
Response to IP’s Growing Impact On Yield And Reliability
One of the reasons I founded SemiWiki nine years ago was the lack of EDA, IP and Foundry content in the media. The problem is that unless you work in the industry it is very difficult to write about it in competent technical detail. Most media outlets only know what vendors tell them which is how the semiconductor industry worked before… Read More
Mentor’s Questa verification tools now run on 64-bit ARM based servers
The server market has been undergoing changes in the last few years. The traditional go-to for server processors had been x86 based chips from Intel or AMD. However, if you go on Amazon AWS looking for EC2 instances, you will see the “A1” instance type, which is an ARM based instance. This is not what you might think at first. The A1 instance… Read More
Functional Safety ARC Processor IP will speed automotive system design
In the automotive space you can’t even get out of the starting gate without Functional Safety (FS). All electronic system that go into cars must have ISO 26262 certification. However, this is not something you slap on after the fact. From the ground up the requirements for ISO 26262 must be considered and the proper processes must… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing