If we agree on the definition of IoT as a distributed set of services based on sensing, sharing and controlling through new nodes, we realize that these nodes are a big hardware opportunity. The chip makers and IP vendors have to create innovative SoC, delivering high performance at low cost and low energy. Moreover, the new systems… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
"Ten-hut!" Attending the Signal Integrity Bootcamp
The engineering team for the design and analysis of a complex system consists of a diverse set of skills — with the increasing emphasis on both high-speed interface design and multi-domain power management, a critical constituent of the team is the group of signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) engineers.
The training… Read More
Mentor gets Busy at DVCon
You’d expect Mentor to be covering a lot of bases at DVCon and you wouldn’t be wrong. They’re hosting tutorials, a lunch, papers, posters, there’s a panel and of course they’ll be on the exhibit floor. I’ll start with an important tutorial that you really should attend, Monday morning, on creating Portable Stimulus Models… Read More
CEO Interview: Srinath Anantharaman of ClioSoft
It will soon be 20 years since ClioSoft started its journey of selling design management software for the semiconductor industry. It was a slow start considering that designs were relatively small and only digital front-end designers had begun to realize the importance of version control and design management. With open source… Read More
Mentor Plays for Keeps in Emulation
EDA has always been a fiercely competitive market, no more so than in emulation where the clash of claims and counter-claims can leave those of us on the sidelines wondering who’s really on top. Sales are the obvious indicator but leadership there flips back and forth between product releases. That makes Mentor’s choice to play … Read More
Four Barriers to Using an SoC for IoT Projects
I often read about the large number of expected IoT design starts around the world, so I started to think about what the barriers are for launching this industry in order to meet the projections. One of my favorite IoT devices is the Garmin Edge 820, a computer for cyclists that has sensors for speed, cadence, power, heart rate, altitude… Read More
Aldec Rounds Out ALINT-PRO Checker
If there’s anyone out there who still doesn’t accept the importance of static RTL verification in the arsenal of functional verification methods, I haven’t met any recently. That wasn’t the case in my early days in this field. Back then I grew used to hearing “I don’t make mistakes in my RTL”, “I’ll catch that in simulation”, “My editor… Read More
Using HSPICE StatEye to Tackle DDR4 Rail Jitter
The world is a risky place, according to Scott Wedge, Principal R&D Engineer at Synopsys, who presented at the Synopsys HSPICE SIG on Feb 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] in Santa Clara. Indeed, the world circuit designers face can be uncertain. Dealing with risk and departure from ideal was a main theme in the fascinating talks at this dinner… Read More
Making Functional Simulation Faster with a Parallel Approach
I’ll never forgot working at Intel on a team designing a graphics chip when we wanted to simulate to ensure proper functionality before tapeout, however because of the long run times it was decided to make a compromise to speed things up by reducing the size of the display window to just 32×32 pixels. Well, when first silicon… Read More
Qorvo Uses ClioSoft to Bring Design Data Management to RF Design
A couple weeks ago I gave a heads-up about a webinar that was being hosted by ClioSoft, Qorvo and Keysight. The topic of the webinar was how to manage custom RF designs across multiple design teams and CAD flows. The webinar was held on February 1st and included presentations by Marcus Ray of Qorvo and Michele Azarian of Keysight.
Much… Read More


Solving the EDA tool fragmentation crisis