Banner Electrical Verification The invisible bottleneck in IC design updated 1
WP_Term Object
(
    [term_id] => 157
    [name] => EDA
    [slug] => eda
    [term_group] => 0
    [term_taxonomy_id] => 157
    [taxonomy] => category
    [description] => Electronic Design Automation
    [parent] => 0
    [count] => 4329
    [filter] => raw
    [cat_ID] => 157
    [category_count] => 4329
    [category_description] => Electronic Design Automation
    [cat_name] => EDA
    [category_nicename] => eda
    [category_parent] => 0
    [is_post] => 
)

You’re Going to Want to Attend the Cadence Photonics Summit Workshop, October 19-20

You’re Going to Want to Attend the Cadence Photonics Summit Workshop, October 19-20
by Tom Dillinger on 10-05-2016 at 12:00 pm

Photonics IC’s (PIC’s) are used to transmit and receive data through a (single-mode or multi-mode) optical fiber carrier, and provide the requisite electro-optical conversion for system integration. The architecture of the PIC spans the full characteristics of data transmission and reception:

  • light generation

Typically,… Read More


"Rigid-Flex Design is Coming"

"Rigid-Flex Design is Coming"
by Tom Dillinger on 10-04-2016 at 12:00 pm

Printed circuit boards that incorporate a combination of traditional PCB technology with flexible substrates, aka rigid-flex designs, have enabled an increasing variety of product designs, that leverage the unique physical form factor and lightweight options that rigid-flex technology offers. Yet, this technology requires… Read More


Meet the POWER9 Chip Family

Meet the POWER9 Chip Family
by Alan Radding on 09-30-2016 at 12:00 pm

When you looked at a chip in the past you primarily were concerned with two things: the speed of the chip, usually expressed in GHz, and how much power it consumed. Today the IBM engineers preparing the newest POWER chip, the 14nm POWER9, are tweaking the chips for the different workloads it might run, such as cognitive or cloud, andRead More


Low power physical design in the age of FinFETs

Low power physical design in the age of FinFETs
by Beth Martin on 09-30-2016 at 7:00 am

Low power is now a goal for most digital circuit designs. This is to reduce costs for packaging, cooling, and electricity; to increase battery life; and to improve performance without overheating. I talked to the experts on physical design for ultra-low power at Mentor Graphics recently about the challenges to P&R tools and… Read More


Cadence DSPs float for efficiency in complex apps

Cadence DSPs float for efficiency in complex apps
by Don Dingee on 09-29-2016 at 4:00 pm

Floating-point computation has been a staple of mainframe, minicomputer, supercomputer, workstation, and PC platforms for decades. Almost all modern microprocessor IP supports the IEEE 754 floating-point standard. Embedded design, for reasons of power and area and thereby cost, often eschews floating-point hardware… Read More


Power Exploration at RTL Design with Mentor PowerPro

Power Exploration at RTL Design with Mentor PowerPro
by Bernard Murphy on 09-29-2016 at 7:00 am

There was a comment recently that design for low power is not an event, it’s a process; that comment is absolutely correct. Power is affected by everything in the electronic ecosystem, from application software all the way down to layout and process choices. Yet power as a metric is much more challenging to model and control than … Read More


Synopsys Hosting Formal Methods in CAD Conference Next Week

Synopsys Hosting Formal Methods in CAD Conference Next Week
by Bernard Murphy on 09-27-2016 at 8:00 pm

SynopsysB

FMCAD (Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design) is a technical conference with a 20-year pedigree. This is a conference for serious formal methods teams. Key notes are from Berkeley and UCLA, committee members are all formal heavyweights and best I can tell, there is no exhibitors area.… Read More


Making photonic design more straightforward

Making photonic design more straightforward
by Don Dingee on 09-27-2016 at 4:00 pm

The arrival of optical computing has been predicted every year for the last fifteen years. As with any other technology backed by prolific research, lofty goals get dialed back as problems are identified. What emerges first is a set of use cases where the technology fits with practical, realizable implementations.

When it comes… Read More


Why is Low Frequency Noise Measurement for ICs Such a Big Deal?

Why is Low Frequency Noise Measurement for ICs Such a Big Deal?
by Daniel Payne on 09-27-2016 at 12:00 pm

Even digital designers need to be aware of how noise impacts their circuits because most clocked designs today use a Phase Locked Loop (PLL) block which contains a circuit called a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) that is quite sensitive in operation to the effects of noise and process variation. As process node scaling continues… Read More


Getting out of DIY Mode for Virtual Prototypes

Getting out of DIY Mode for Virtual Prototypes
by Don Dingee on 09-26-2016 at 4:00 pm

Virtual prototyping has, inexplicably, been largely a DIY thing so far. Tools and models have come from different sources with different approaches, and it has been up to the software development team to do the integration step and cobble together a toolchain and methodology that fits with their development effort.

That integration… Read More