Semiconductors are not only critical to modern life, semiconductors are critical to National Security. Now that leading edge semiconductor foundries have left the United States one of the more pressing challenges is secure semiconductor manufacturing. This applies to all countries of course so let’s take a look at the International… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Project Verification Planning for Analog Designs
Successful projects leverage the investment in comprehensive methodology and resource planning, covering design and analysis flows – that planning effort is especially important for functional verification.
The emergence of complex SoC designs for advanced automotive applications has led to a major focus on verification… Read More
Goldilocks Solution for SOC Processors
SOC designers face choices when it comes to choosing how to implement algorithms in their designs. Moving them to hardware usually offers advantages of smaller area, less power and faster processing. Witness the migration of block chain hashing from CPUs to ASICs. However, these advantages can come with trade-offs. For one, … Read More
AI, Deep Learning, SystemC, UVM, PSS – DVCon Has it All
Today I had the pleasure to speak with Tom Fitzpatrick, TPC Chair for the DVCon conferenceand exhibition slated for February 25-28 in the heart of Silicon Valley – San Jose. Tom lives in Massachusetts, a place where I used to live and work at Wang Labs, back in the day before the PC and WordPerfect software ended Wang’s… Read More
Accelerating 5G Innovation and Reliability Through Simulation and Advanced FinFET Design
In an ANSYS seminar held at DesignCon 2019, Dr. Larry Williams, ANSYS Director of Technology, outlined how 5G design innovation can be accelerated through simulation. He posited that 5G will become a general-purpose technology that affects an entire economy, drastically alter societies and unleash a cascade of complementary… Read More
Renaming and Refactoring in HDL Code
I’ve enjoyed my past discussions with Cristian Amitroaie, the CEO of AMIQ EDA, in which we covered their Design and Verification Tools (DVT) Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and their Verissimo SystemVerilog Testbench Linter. Cristian’s descriptions of AMIQ’s products and customers have intrigued me. They… Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES Talks About Enabling Development of 5G ICs
5G is in the news again. Sprint has mounted a legal challenge against ATT, claiming that ATT is misleading people into believing that they already are offering 5G. While ATT is about to start testing of 5G, they have also sent out updates that causes customer phones to display 5GE when they are still on 4G LTE systems. The truth is that… Read More
Data Management Challenges in Physical Design
IC physical design (PD) teams face several challenges while dealing with tapeout schedules. With shrinking process nodes and stringent PPA targets, the complexity of physical design flows and EDA design tools has increased multifold. In addition the amount of design data that needs to be managed has also increased exponentially.… Read More
Where Circuit Simulation Model Files Come From
I started out my engineering career by doing transistor-level circuit design and we used a proprietary SPICE circuit simulator. One thing that I quickly realized was that the accuracy of my circuit simulations depended entirely on the model files and parasitics. Here we are 40 years later and the accuracy of SPICE circuit simulations… Read More
Getting to 56G Takes The Right Stuff
During the 1940s when aerospace engineers were attempting to break the sound barrier for the first time, they were confronting a slew of new technical issues that had never been dealt with before, and in some cases never seen before. In subsonic flight airflow was predictable and well understood. In crossing the sound barrier, … Read More


The $9.5 Billion Design IP Market: Shifting Boundaries, Arm’s Monopoly, and the RISC-V Response