This year I signed books in the Fractal booth (compliments of Fractal) and let me tell you it was quite an experience. IP quality is a very touchy subject and the source of many more tape-out delays than I had imagined. As it turns out, commercial IP is the biggest offender which makes no sense to me whatsoever. Even more shocking, one… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Liberate Trio Embraces ML and Cloud
A chain is as strong as its weakest link. This phrase resonates well in Static Timing Analysis (STA) domain, though it is about accuracy rather than durability. As timing signoff step provides the final performance readings of a design, an STA outcome is as good as its underlying components. Aside from the parasitic extraction … Read More
CEO Interview: Cristian Amitroaie of AMIQ EDA
AMIQ EDA has caught my attention over the last few months. My first impression was that this was just another small IDE company trying to compete with established and bundled IDEs from the big 3, a seemingly insurmountable barrier. This view was challenged by an impressive list of testimonials, not just from the little guys but also… Read More
DAC 2018 Potpourri
The venue
Despite of being held at the new three-story Moscone West building, this year 55th DAC in San Francisco bore many similarities as compared with last year’s. Similar booth decors and floorplan positioning of the big two, Synopsys and Cadence, which were across of each other and right next to the first floor entrance –although… Read More
Design for Power: An Insider View
The second keynote at Mentor’s U2U this year was given by Hooman Moshar, VP of Engineering at Broadcom, on the always (these days) important topic of design for power. This is one of my favorite areas. I have, I think, a decent theoretical background in the topic, but I definitely need a periodic refresh on the ground reality from the… Read More
Integrity, Reliability Shift Left with ICC
There is a nice serendipity in discovering that two companies I cover are working together. Good for them naturally but makes my job easier because I already have a good idea about the benefits of the partnership. Synopsys and ANSYS announced a collaboration at DAC 2017 for accelerating design optimization for HPS, mobile and automotive.… Read More
Leveraging AI to help build AI SOCs
When I first started working in the semiconductor industry back in 1982, I realized that there was a race going on between the complexity of the system being designed and the capabilities of the technology in the tools and systems used to design them. The technology used to design the next generation of hardware was always lagging… Read More
Cadence in the Cloud!
The first clue was cloud vendors (Amazon, Google, IBM, etc…) at 55DAC for the first time ever with lots of cloud content including a Design on Cloud Pavilion. The second clue was the pre-briefing from Cadence last week. There has also been a lot of cloud chatter in the semiconductor ecosystem so yes, I saw this coming and EDA will get… Read More
Mentor at the 55th Design Automation Conference
It’s hard to believe that this is the 55th DAC and even harder to believe that this will be my 35th. So much has changed in 35 years, with DAC back in San Francisco I expect a VERY big crowd and even bigger announcements, absolutely.
Not only is this an epic time for semiconductors, I would say that EDA is exciting again and the Mentor… Read More
Achieving Clean Design Early with Calibre-RTD
Functional and physical verification are easily the two long poles in most IC product developments. During a design implementation cycle, design teams tend to push physical verification (PV) step towards the end as it is a time consuming process and requires significant manual interventions.
PV Challenges
In the traditional… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside