I come from a car-centric family where my father actually bought and sold over 300 vehicles in his lifetime, so automotive mega-trends pique my interest. A new conference called Semiconductors ISO 26262 held it’s first annual event last month, meeting in Munich with guest speakers from some impressive companies like: … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Conflating ISO 26262 and DO-254
If you’re in the ASIC business, by now you should have a rough understanding of ISO 26262, the safety standard for automotive electronics. You may be less familiar with DO-254 which has somewhat similar intent for airborne electronics. Unless, that is, you design with FPGAs in which case your familiarity may be the other way around… Read More
IoT Designs Beginning to Shift to 7nm: Promises Upside for Cadence Physically-Aware Design Flow
Until recently, ICs at bleeding edge nodes like 7nm technology from foundries like TSMC were mostly targeted for high-performance-computing (HPC) and mobile applications or possibly high radix switches that needed the increased performance of advanced nodes. The momentum of Moore’s law and Moore-than-Moore saw foundries… Read More
Webinar: Fast-track SoC Verification – Reduce time-to-first-test with Synopsys VC AutoTestbench
There seems to be a general sense that we have the foundations for block/IP verification more or less under control, thanks to UVM standardizing infrastructure for directed and constrained-random testing, along with class libraries providing building blocks to simplify verification reuse, build sequence tests, verify register… Read More
Designing an SoC for 3D TV Without using the Funny Glasses
In the blur of activities at DAC last year I visited the Mentor booth a few times and had just a few minutes to glance at a 3D TV display that didn’t require me to wear any funny glasses, kind of novel I thought at the time because I’ve read that the market of 3D TV sets is being hampered by requiring viewers to wear glasses. The… Read More
Simulation and Formal – Finding the Right Balance
Simulation dominates hardware functional verification today and likely will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile formal verification, once thought to be a possible challenger for the title, has instead converged on a more effective role as a complement to simulation. Formal excels at finding problems… Read More
Moore’s Law Drives Foundries and IP Providers
2017 was a banner year for semiconductor sales as they topped $400B for the first time, an increase of some 20%, there is happiness in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, South Korea, and well, everywhere. With the foundries pushing to ever-smaller process dimensions and even going back to mature nodes and offering more variations that are… Read More
Thermal Modeling for ADAS goes MultiPhysics
In electronic system design, we have grown comfortable with the idea that different regimes of analysis, such as the chip, the package and the system, or electrical, thermal and stress are more or less independent – what starts in one regime stays in that regime, give or take some margin information passed onto other regimes. And… Read More
A Reliable Way to Forecast Growth of Semiconductor Markets
Wally Rhines, President and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Group, did another one of his famous deep learning presentations at SEMI ISS 2018. Using the Gompertz Curve Lifecycle to forecast the future growth of semiconductor markets, Wally looks at: Image sensors, Desktop PCs, PC Notebooks, Cell Phone Subscribers, Smartphones, and… Read More
Mentor Tessent Products Ready for Second Edition of ISO 26262 Coming in March 2018
Have you notice how smart your automobile is getting? Watching the first round of NFL playoffs I lost count on the number of TV commercials showing cars weaving through tight construction zones (and Star Wars figures), big trucks parking in incredibly tight spaces, cars avoiding rear-end collisions and pedestrians, and even … Read More


The Name Changes but the Vision Remains the Same – ESD Alliance Through the Years