A few months ago, I wrote about the announcement of a new digital full flow from Cadence. In that piece, I focused on the machine learning (ML) aspects of the new tool. I had covered a discussion with Cadence’s Paul Cunningham a week before that explored ML in Cadence products, so it was timely to dive into a real-world example of the … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Fast and Accurate Variation-Aware Mixed-Signal Verification of Time-Domain 2-Step ADC
There is an interesting white paper out from Mentor on how a customer used the Solido Varation Designer tool to reduce Monte Carlo simulations. As you may know I worked for Solido for 10+ years up until they were acquired by Mentor in December of 2017. It was an incredible personal and professional experience. I have the highest respect… Read More
What’s New in Verdi? Faster Debug
Want fast debug? Synopsys recently hosted a Webinar to show off the latest and greatest improvements to Verdi® in performance, memory demand and multi-tasking, among other areas.
Performance improvements
Taruna Reddy (PMM) and Allen Hsieh (Staff apps) presented features of the latest version, released in March – Taruna started… Read More
Qualcomm on Power Estimation, Optimizing for Gaming on Mobile GPUs
I don’t look at the RTL power estimation topic too often these days, so I was interested to see that ANSYS still has a very strong position in this area. Qualcomm is using PowerArtist on one of the most demanding modern applications – mobile GPU power gaming. Mobile gaming heavily loads the GPU, so any optimization in that area will … Read More
Interview with Altair CTO Sam Mahalingam
In this interview we talk with Sam Mahalingam, chief technology officer at Altair, about gaining a competitive edge with software that’s built to handle high-throughput workloads like chip design and electronic design automation (EDA). Altair is a global technology company providing solutions in product development, high-performance… Read More
CEO Interview: John O’Donnel of yieldHUB
Let me introduce John O’Donnell, CEO of yieldHUB. After earning a degree in microelectronics John spent 18 years at Analog Devices before founding yieldHUB in 2005. If anybody knows yield it is Analog Devices having shipped billions upon billions of chips, absolutely.
SemiWiki will be digging deeper into the technology… Read More
Nobody Ever Lost Their Job for Spending too Much on Hardware Verification, Did They?
A paper was published last month on the Acuerdo Consultancy Services website authored by Joe Convey of Acuerdo and Bryan Dickman of Valytic Consulting. Joe and Bryan spent combined decades in the Semi and EDA World which means they have a great understanding of hardware bugs first hand, absolutely.
Here is a quick summary… Read More
Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited
I believe I asked this question a year or two ago and answered it for the absolute bleeding edge of datacenter performance – Google TPU and the like. Those hyperscalars (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, etc) who want to do on-the-fly recognition in pictures so they can tag friends in photos, do almost real-time machine… Read More
How to Grow with Poise and Grace, a Tale of Scalability from ClioSoft
ClioSoft published a white paper recently entitled Best Practices are the Foundations of a Startup. The piece discusses the needs and challenges associated with building a scalable infrastructure to support growth.
Before I get into more details on ClioSoft’s white paper, I would offer my own experience on this topic – the need… Read More
Design Technology Co-Optimization (DTCO) for sub-5nm Process Nodes
Summary
Design Technology Co-Optimization (DTCO) analysis was pursued for library cell PPA estimates for gate-all-around (GAA) devices and new metallurgy options. The cell design and process recommendations are a bit surprising.
Introduction
During the “golden years” of silicon technology evolution that applied Dennard… Read More


AI Bubble?