Transistor-level design for full-custom and analog circuits has long been a way for IC design companies to get the absolute best performance out of silicon and keep ahead of the competition. One challenge to circuit designers is meeting all of the specs across all Process, Voltage and Temperature (PVT) corners, so that silicon… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Analytics and Visualization for Big Data Chip Analysis
Designers require comprehensive logical, physical, and electrical models to interpret the results of full-chip power noise and electromigration analysis flows, and subsequently deduce the appropriate design updates to address any analysis issues. These models include: LEF, DEF, Liberty library models (including detailed… Read More
WEBINAR: A UVM Cookbook Update
Something I always admire about Mentor is their willingness to invest their time and money in helping the industry at large. They do this especially in verification where they sponsor periodic Wilson surveys on the state of verification needs and usage in the industry. More recently they introduced their UVM Cookbook, an introduction… Read More
A Closer Look at Fusion from Synopsys at #55DAC
Synopsys is pretty well-known for their early entry into logic synthesis with the Design Compiler tool and more recent P&R tool with IC Compiler, so I met up with two folks at DAC to get a better idea of what this new Fusion technology was all about where the barriers between tools are changing. Michael Jackson and Rahul Deokar … Read More
Verifying ESD Fixes Faster with Incremental Analysis
The author of this article, Dündar Dumlugöl, is CEO of Magwel. He has 25 years of experience in EDA managing the development of leading products used for circuit simulation and high-level system design.
Every designer knows how tedious it can be to shuttle back and forth between their layout tool and analysis tools. Every time an… Read More
When it Comes to Process Migration, “Standard Cells” are Anything But
Standard cell library developers are faced with a daunting task when it is time to create a library for a new process node. Porting an existing library can be a big help, but even then, manual modifications to 800 or more cells is still required. Each of those cells has many geometric elements are that affected by new design rules. All… Read More
The Pain of Test Pattern Bring-up for First Silicon Debug
In the semiconductor world we have divided our engineering talent up into many adjacent disciplines and each comes with their own job titles: Design engineers, Verification engineers, DFT engineers, Test engineers. When first silicon becomes available then everyone on the team, and especially management all have a few big … Read More
Harnessing Clock and Power
Switching translates to power. Similar to the recent slow down experienced by Moore’s Law, the constant power density (power demand per unit chip area) prescribed by Dennard scaling was no longer affordable across the technological scaling. While the contribution of leakage power component in advanced process nodes was getting… Read More
Computer Vision Design with HLS
I’m on a mini-roll on the subject of high-level design for ML-based systems. No complaints from me, this is one of my favorite domains and is certainly a hot area; it’s great to that EDA vendors are so active in advancing ML-based design. Here I want to talk about the Catapult HLS flow for use in ML design.
Since I’ve covered the ML topic… Read More
Webinar: NetSpeed is about to change the way SOCs are designed
A large part of the effort in designing SOCs has shifted to the integration of their constituent IP blocks. Many IP blocks used in SOCs come as ready to use components and the real work has become making them work together. Network on Chip (NoC) has been a huge help in this task, handling the interconnections between blocks and planning… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside