From a consumer viewpoint I want the longest battery life from my electronic devices: iPad tablet, Galaxy Note 4 smart phone, Garmin Edge 820 bike computer, and Amazon Kindle book reader. In September I blogged about RTL Design Restructuring and how it could help achieve lower power, and this month I’m looking forward to … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Circuit Simulation Videos Show How To
One of the things that I miss most about attending trade shows like DAC in the old days was that you actually got to see EDA tools being demonstrated live in the exhibit area. You could see what the GUI looked like, how the dialogs worked, and learn what kind of control you could have during analysis. Most of what you see today at DAC in the… Read More
Machine Learning – Turning Up the Sizzle in EDA
There’s always a lot of activity in EDA to innovate and refine specialized algorithms in functional modeling, implementation, verification and many other aspects of design automation. But when Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft are pushing AI, deep learning, Big Data and cloud technologies, it can be hard not to see… Read More
Case study illustrates 171x speed up using SCE-MI
As SoC design size and complexity increases, simulation alone falls farther and farther behind, even with massive cloud farms of compute resources. Hardware acceleration of simulation is becoming a must-have for many teams, but means more than just providing emulation… Read More
Drift is a Bad Thing for SPICE Circuit Simulators
My first job out of college was with Intel, located in Aloha, Oregon and I did circuit simulations using a proprietary SPICE circuit simulator called ASPEC that was maintained in-house. While doing some circuit simulations one day I noticed that an internal node in one of my circuits was gradually getting higher and higher, even… Read More
Processors, Processors, Processors Everywhere
At first glance a processor conference might seem a bit arcane, however we live in an era where processors are ubiquitous. There is hardly any aspect of our lives that they do not touch in some way. Last week at the Linley Processor Conference the topics included deep learning, autonomous driving, energy, manufacturing, smart cities,… Read More
You’re Going to Want to Attend the Cadence Photonics Summit Workshop, October 19-20
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"
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
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, and… Read More
Low power physical design in the age of FinFETs
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


AI Bubble?