Process and device engineers have a tough task to model and simulate an IC process prior to fabricating silicon, however this approach is much better than the alternative choice in the 1970’s of just running multiple lots of wafers and then making measurements to see if your node was meeting specifications. Out of Stanford… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
The Future of FPGA Prototyping!
This interview originally appeared as the foreword to our book “Prototypical: The Emergence of FPGA-based Prototyping for SoC Design” but I thought it would be worth publishing for those of you who have not downloaded it yet. I also wanted to mention that our friends at S2C are currently offering a 50% discount on the… Read More
Nvidia Drives into New Market with Deep Learning and the Drive PX 2
Nvidia has found that video games are the perfect metaphor for autonomous driving. To understand why this is so relevant you have to realize that the way self-driving cars see the world is through a virtual world created in real time inside the processors used for autonomous driving – very much like a video game. It’s a little bit like… Read More
These 2 Markets to Drive IC Market Growth through 2020
Spotting trends is an essential insight for marketing folks, general managers and C-level executives in our semiconductor industry. You could read hundreds of press releases, attend dozens of conferences, and interview all of the major thought leaders to help spot an emerging trend, or you could subscribe to a service like IC… Read More
Expert Interview: Rajeev Madhavan
This blog was originally posted on Paysa.com but since Rajeev Madhavan is one of our EDA Heroes I thought it was worth a re-post. In case you do not know Rajeev, he started his EDA career at Cadence then was co-founder and VP of Engineering at LogicVision (acquired by Mentor). Next he was Founder, President, and Chairman of Ambit Design… Read More
How to Secure a SoC while Keeping Area and Power Competitive?
I have attended LETI conference last June and remember the paper presented by Alain Merle, their security guru. Alain said that smart cards are secured because up to 50% of the Silicon area is dedicated to security. When you design a SoC to address applications like smart metering, NFC payment or embedded SIM, you know in advance … Read More
CEO Interview: Rene Donkers of Fractal Technologies
Fractal is another one of those very successful emerging EDA companies that you don’t read a lot about, except on SemiWiki. Rene Donkers is co-founder and CEO of Fractal Technologies, a company addressing IP quality assurance. This is a niche in the SoC tooling market that deserves some justification. Why not use an IP as-is… Read More
CEO Interview: Albert Li of Platform DA
Platform Design Automation, Inc (PDA). recently closed a US$6 million pre Series A investment round, and the company has shifted its focus from providing SPICE modeling related software and services to forming a complete AI-driven ecosystem from probing to simulation. Albert Li was the GM of Accelicon, a leading EDA tool and … Read More
Cadence Design Secures Photonic Beachhead
I had the privilege to attend a five-day PIC (photonic integrated circuit) training hosted by 7-Penniesand Tektronix in San Jose, CA this week. This training was quite comprehensive and covered photonic materials and platforms, design automation, fabrication, packaging and test. It also included invited talks from photonic… Read More
ATPG, Automotive and 7nm FinFET
The state of Texas hosted two or our industry’s big technical conferences and trade shows this year: DAC and ITC (International Test Conference). IC designers know about DAC in Austin, and test engineers know about ITC in Dallas. I travelled to Austin to cover DAC this past summer, and I was able to connect with Robert Ruiz … Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification