For the latest incremental improvements to its Riviera-PRO functional verification platform, Aldec has turned to streamlining random constraint performance. The new Riviera-PRO 2016.02 release also is now fully supported on Windows 10 and adds a new debugger tool.… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Verdi Update and NVIDIA on Verification Compiler
Synopsys hosted a lunch session on Thursday of DVCon. Michael Sanie of Synopsys opened the session, with a look back at the last DVCon where he had talked about Verification Compiler (VC) and extending the platform to Verification Continuum, which adds emulation and FPGA-based prototyping (HAPS – there was a very cool HAPS demo… Read More
Mentor at DVCon – Visualize This
Steve Bailey entertained us during lunch on Tuesday with a talk on debug and visualization in the Mentor platform. Steve is based in Colorado, so had to spend the first part of his talk gloating about their Super Bowl win, but I guess he deserves that.
On a more technical note, he showed us a familiar survey they had completed with the… Read More
Cadence is again the best EDA company to work for!
We wrote about the history of Cadence in preparation for our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” in 2012. EDA played a key role in enabling the fabless semiconductor revolution and Cadence was right there at the beginning. Famed EETimes editor Richard Goering helped us with the book and the Cadence… Read More
How China can Lead in the Semiconductor Industry
Since a few years China has been very aggressive in acquiring semiconductor companies around the world. Last year, Chinese government along with PE (Private Equity) and other investors in China announced an ambitious plan under which more than $150 billion were to be invested over next 5 to 10 years in developing semiconductor… Read More
Ajoy – History, Perspectives and Crossing the Chasm
EDAC hosted an event at DVCon this week where Jim Hogan interviewed Ajoy Bose (CEO of Atrenta prior to its acquisition by Synopsys). The nominal purpose was to talk about turning a venture into a valuable enterprise. This was covered but, in Jim’s way, it was really a more wide-ranging and personal interview. This is an abstract of… Read More
IC Design and OpenAccess
EDA vendors have long used proprietary file and database formats to keep their users locked into their specific tool flow and keep any competitors from sharing in the IC design process. Along the way the actual users of EDA tools have often requested and helped to create interoperable flows so that they could mix and match multiple… Read More
Dr. Walden Rhines on the Past Present and Future!
Who can present seventy six slides in sixty minutes, still have time for questions, AND make it interesting? Dr. Walden Rhines that’s who. Here is a link to the presentation but I have to warn you, it is a 100MB PDF file:
Design Verification Challenges: Past, Present, and Future
The DVCon conference was well attended again this year… Read More
Start Your HBM 2.5D Design Today!
Next week there is a live seminar at the famed Computer Museum in Silicon Valley that you won’t want to miss. If you haven’t been to the Computer Museum here is what you are missing:… Read More
A Brief History of Defacto Technologies
In early 2000s, semiconductor design at RTL level was gaining momentum. The idea was to process more design steps such as insertion of test and other design structures upfront at the RTL level. The design optimization and verification were to be done at the RTL level to reduce long iterations through gate level design because changes… Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification