In the early days of IC design there were arguments against using any extra transistors or gates for testability purposes, because that would be adding extra silicon area which in turn would drive up the costs of the chip and product. Today we are older and wiser, realizing that there are product pricing benefits to quickly test each… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
New Frontiers in the Storage System Market Call for the Best of ICE and Virtual Emulation
The storage market has reached what Andy Grove once described as “…a strategic inflection point.”[1] This is the stage in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.
Changing fundamentals in the storage market—where solid state drives (SSD) are now at the forefront of multiple storage applications,… Read More
Emergence of Segment-Specific DDRn Memory Controller
The semiconductor industry is served today by memory devices supporting various protocols, like DDR4, DDR3, LPDDR4, LPDDR3, GDDR5, HBM, HMC, etc. The trend is clearly to define application specific memory-protocols and in some cases, application specific devices. But developing many, and different, memory controllers … Read More
FPGAs for a few thousand devices more
An incredibly pervasive trend at last year’s ARM TechCon was the IoT, and I expect this year to bring even more of the same, but with a twist. Where last year was mostly focused on ultra-low power edge devices and the mbed ecosystem, this year is likely to show a better balance of ideas across all three IoT tiers. I also expect a slew of … Read More
Making your AMS Simulators Faster (webinar)
I’ve been following Cadence Design Systems ever since it was formed in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. At that time I was working at Silicon Compiler Systems, soon to be acquired by Mentor Graphics. ClioSoft is another company that I’ve known about for several years now, mostly for their design management… Read More
CEO Interview: Simon Butler of Methodics
It has been interesting to watch Methodics transform from an EDA company with their VersIC design management product to Life Cycle Management with ProjectIC, and now a Systems Company with WarpStor. Methodics was founded in 2006 by 2 ex-Cadence experts in the Custom IC design tools space, Simon Butler and Fergus Slorach. Today… Read More
Fabless Photonic Design Flow Takes Shape as Cadence teams up with Lumerical and PhoeniX
This week Cadence Design, Lumerical Solutions and PhoeniX Software hosted a two-day photonic summit and workshop. The first day had nearly 100 registered participants and featured industry leaders from Global Foundries, UCSB, MIT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, General Electric, Boeing, Rockley Photonics, and Juniper Networks… Read More
Webinar Offers View into TSMC IP Design Methodology
Standard cell and memory IP are key enablers for new process node availability. These two items must be in place early and be completely ready for a process node to scale to volume. Development of both leaves no room for error and they require the highest performance possible. Foundries are extremely focused on this and spend a lot… Read More
The Fabless Empire Strikes Back, Global Foundries and Cadence make moves into Integrated Photonics!
In August I wrote an article proclaiming Score 1 for IDMs vs Fabless and discussedIntel’sannouncement of volume production of their 100G PSM4 and 100G CWDM4 transceiver products.
This week the Fabless Empire strikes back.Daniel Nenni and I attended a two-day Photonic Summit and workshop hosted by Cadence Design, PhoeniX Software… Read More
Why Integrate Bluetooth LE IP in a Single Wearable SoC?
Did you know that, in over 800 teardowns of mobile and wearable products from 2012 to 2015, wireless chips outnumbered the actual number of products, indicating multiple wireless ICs in some designs ([SUP]1[/SUP])? It could be interesting to look at the advantages of integrating wireless technology such as Bluetooth low energy… Read More


RISC-V and AI: The Architecture Shift Is Now