Cadence has done a good job of keeping up with the needs of analog RF designs. Of course, the term RF used to be reserved for a thin slice of designs that were used specifically in RF applications. Now, it covers things like SerDes for networking chips that have to operate in the gigahertz range. Add that to the trend of combining RF and… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
IBIS-AMI Model Generation Simplified
The increasing demand for data communication throughput between system components has driven the requirement for faster SerDes IP data rates. The complexity of the transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) signal conditioning functions has correspondingly evolved. As a result, the simulation methodology for SerDes electrical interface… Read More
Webinar: ASIC and FPGA Functional Verification Study
ASIC or FPGA? Each design style has earned designers’ votes depending on the level of urgency, application complexity and funding of their assigned projects. While it is feasible to transition from ASIC to FPGA design or vice versa, such a move is usually done across project refresh instead of midcourse.
The Latest in Parasitic Netlist Reduction and Visualization
The user group events held by EDA companies offer a unique opportunity to hear from designers and CAD engineers who are actually using the EDA tools “in the trenches”. Some user presentations are pretty straightforward – e.g., providing a quality-of-results (QoR) design comparison when invoking a new tool feature added to a recent… Read More
Portable Stimulus enables new design and verification methodologies
My usual practice when investing is to look at startup companies and try to understand if the market they are looking to serve has a significant opportunity for a new and disruptive technology. This piece compiles the ideas that I used to form an investment thesis in Portable Stimulus. Once collected, I often share ideas to get feedback.… Read More
Advanced Materials and New Architectures for AI Applications
Over the past 50 years in our industry, there have been three invariant principles:
- Moore’s Law drives the pace of Si technology scaling
- system memory utilizes MOS devices (for SRAM and DRAM)
- computation relies upon the “von Neumann” architecture
Technology Behind the Chip
Tom Dillinger and I attended the Silvaco SURGE 2018 event in Silicon Valley last week with several hundred of our semiconductor brethren. Tom has a couple blogs ready to go but first let’s talk about the keynote by Silvaco CEO David Dutton. David isn’t your average EDA CEO, he spent the first 8 years of his career at Intel then spent … Read More
Detail-Route-Centric Physical Implementation for 7nm
For many years TSMC has provided IC design implementation guidance as viewed from the process and manufacturing standpoints. The last time TSMC Reference Flow incremented, it was version 12.0 back in 2011. Since then, increased design, process and packaging related complexities of the advanced nodes have demanded more focused… Read More
Crossfire Baseline Checks for Clean IP Part II
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
Closing Coverage in HLS
Coverage is a common metric with many manifestation. During the ‘90s, both fault and test coverage were mainstream DFT (Design For Testability) terminologies used to indicate the percentage of a design being observable or tested. Its pervasive use was then spilled over into other design segments such as code coverage, formal… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside