A piece of learning we all seem to have gained from practical considerations of IoT infrastructure is that no, it doesn’t make sense to ship all the data from an IoT edge device to the cloud and let the cloud do all the computational heavy lifting. On the face of it that idea seemed good – all those edge devices could be super cheap (silicon… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Webinar on Electrochemistry and how it affects Semiconductor devices
My educational background is Electrical Engineering and I’ve learned a lot since starting in the industry back in 1978 while working on bipolar, NMOS and CMOS technology, designing DRAM, data controller and GPU devices. I continue to learn about the semiconductor industry through daily reading and attending trade shows… Read More
An Informal Update
I mentioned back in June that Synopsys had launched a blog on formal verification, intended to demystify the field and provide help in understanding key concepts. It’s been a few months, time to check in on some of their more recent posts.
First up, it feels like they are finding their groove. Relaxed style, useful topics but now with… Read More
Is there anything in VLSI layout other than pushing polygons? (2)
One of the important changes that happen between 1984 and 1988 is the hardware platforms development. Calma evolved, mainframe S140 with 2 combined monitors per terminal in S280 with 2 individual monitors per terminal. This meant that from noisy and darker rooms we move to more quiet and lighted rooms. We doubled the speed and the… Read More
Photonics Summit Delivers High-Bandwidth Discussion on State of Silicon Photonics
On September 6, 2017, Cadence Design Systems, Lumerical Solutions and PhoeniX Software hosted their second Photonics Summit. As with last year’s summit, this was a two-day event, with the first day including in a myriad of photonics presentations and the second day being a hands-on workshop. The hands-on workshop taught attendees… Read More
Adoption, Architecture and Origami
Last week I sat in on Oski’s latest in a series of “Decoding Formal” sessions. Judging by my first experience, they plan and manage these events very well. Not too long (~3 hours of talks), good food (DishDash), good customer content, a good forward-looking topic and a very entertaining wrap-up talk.… Read More
TSMC Teamwork Translates to Technical Triumph
Most people think that designing successful high speed analog circuits requires a mixture of magic, skill and lots of hard work. While this might be true, in reality it also requires a large dose of collaboration among each of the members of the design, tool and fabrication panoply. This point was recently made abundantly clear … Read More
Design for Manufacturability Analysis for PCB’s
Chip designers are familiar with the additional physical design checking requirements that were incorporated into flows at advanced process nodes. With the introduction of optical correction and inverse lithography technology applied during mask data generation, and with the extension of a 193nm exposure source to finer… Read More
Emulation Methodology for Drones and Other Video-Intensive Multimedia SoCs
What do drones, augmented reality devices, and 4K UHD TV have in common? They all include complex system-on-chips (SoCs) that must encode and decode, in real-time, data for increasingly higher definition video content. Verifying that these SoC designs are functionally correct is quite complex, but they must also function efficiently… Read More
High-Speed Equivalence Checking
Following on product introductions for simulation and prototyping, physical verification and implementation earlier in the year, Anirudh Devgan (Exec VP and GM at Cadence), the king of speed and parallelism has done it again, this time with logic equivalence checking (LEC). Cadence recently announced an advance to their well-known… Read More


CEO Interview with Aftkhar Aslam of yieldWerx