CMP (Chemical Mechanical Planarization or also known as Chemical Mechanical Polishing) is a wafer fabrication step applied generally after a chemical deposition –intended to smoothen and to flatten (planarize) wafer surfaces with the combination of chemical and mechanical forces. Developed at IBM and since its introduction… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Physical Verification with IC Validator
If a picture worths a thousand words, a tapeout quality SoC design with billions of polygons would compose a good book. To proofread this final design transformation format requires a foundry driven DRC/LVS signoff solution that nowadays is becoming more complex with further process scaling and shrinking pitch dimension.
Despite… Read More
Emulation Evaluation for the Ages!
One of the more entertaining things I get to observe in the semiconductor ecosystem is competitive customer evaluations of tools and IP. Seriously, this is where the rubber meets the road no matter what the press releases say.
This time it was emulators which is one of the most interesting EDA market segments since there is no dominant… Read More
Synopsys Offers Smooth Sailing for OTP NVM
Nobody likes drama. Wait, let me narrow that down a bit. Chip designers really hate drama. They live in a world of risk and uncertainty, a world that tool and IP vendors spend considerable resources trying to make safer and more rational. It’s notable just how ironic that Sidense and Kilopass were duking out patent litigation in the… Read More
SoC Design Partitioning to Save Time and Avoid Mistakes
I started designing ICs in 1978 and continued through 1986, and each chip used hierarchy and partitioning but our methodology was totally ad-hoc, and documented on paper, so it was time consuming to make revisions to the chip or train someone else on the history or our chip, let alone re-use any portion of our chips again. Those old,… Read More
Cadence Automotive Summit Sensor Enablement Highlights
At the November 14 Cadence Automotive Summit, Ian Dennison, Senior Group Director, outlined sensor enablement technologies and SoC mixed-signal design solutions, from Virtuoso electrically aware design with high current, high reliability, yield and performance tools and methodologies enabling ADAS/AV sensors for vehicle… Read More
Photonics with CurvyCore
As a preferred carrier to data or energy, photonics technology is becoming broad and diverse. In IC design, silicon-photonics technology has been the enabler of new capabilities and has revolutionized many applications as Moore’s-based scaling started to experience a slowdown. It acts as new on-chip inductor in HPC design … Read More
Next-Generation Formal Verification
As SoC and IP designs continue to increase in complexity while schedules accelerate, verification teams are looking for methodologies to improve design confidence more quickly. Formal verification techniques provide one route to improved design confidence, and the increase in papers and interest at industry conferences… Read More
Sequential Equivalency Checks in HLS
Higher level synthesis (HLS) of an IP block involves taking its high-level design specification –usually captured in SystemC or C++, synthesizes and generates its RTL equivalent. HLS provides a faster convergence path to design code stability, promotes design reuse and lowers front-end design inception cost.
HLS and Mentor… Read More
Big Data Analytics in Early Power Planning
ANSYS recently hosted a webinar talking about how they used the big-data analytics available in RedHawk-SC to do early power grid planning with static analytics, providing better coverage than would have been possible through pure simulation-based approaches. The paradox here is that late-stage analysis of voltage drops … Read More


Quantum Computing Technologies and Challenges