Having known Vic for many years, it is always great to spend time with him and catch up on what is happening inside the semiconductor ecosystem. As Senior Vice President and General Manager, RTL Power Business, at ANSYS in Silicon Valley, Vic spends a lot of time in the field with customers, partners, and at industry events so he has… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Automotive Semiconductor Safety
One of the more telling trends in the semiconductor industry is the “fabless systems companies” transformation. Systems companies that used to buy chips are now making their own to better control the system they are designing: from the chip, package, PCB, the complete system. Apple is the best example as they are now one of the most… Read More
How to nail your PPA tradeoffs
How do you ensure your design has been optimized for power, performance, and area? I posed this question to Mentor’s Group Director of Marketing, Sudhakar Jilla and product specialist Mark Le. They said that finding the PPA sweet spot is still often done by trial and error – basically serial experiments with various input parameters… Read More
Protium for the win in software development
Cadence Design Systems is a long-standing provider in hardware emulation, but a relative newcomer to FPGA-based prototyping. In an upcoming lunch and learn session on November 11 in San Jose, Cadence teams will be outlining their productivity strategy. What’s different with their approach and why is this worth a lunch?… Read More
Keeping It Fresh with the Veloce Deterministic ICE App
In The Times They Are A Changin’ Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan advised us to “heed the call” of change or suffer the consequences. This couldn’t be more true, considering what design and verification engineers face every day in the midst of the technological revolution.
Change has never been so rapid. And it requires we constantly adapt.… Read More
IoT From SEMI Meeting: EDA, Image Sensors, MEMS
Last Friday I learned something new about IoT by attending a SEMI event in Wilsonville, OR just a few short miles away from where I live in Tualatin. SEMI puts on two events here in Oregon each year, and their latest event on IoT Sensors was quite timely and popular judging by how many attendees showed up. First up was Jeff Miller from … Read More
Behind the 3DEXPERIENCE for Silicon
We’ve been covering the Dassault Systèmes “Silicon Thinking” platform for a while here, but, as I’m often prone to do, I wanted to explore the backstory to uncover more about the concept. With over 25M users of their product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions, why is Dassault Systèmes becoming so interested in semiconductor… Read More
Can one flow bring four domains together?
IoT edge device design means four domains – MEMS, analog, digital, and RF – not only work together, but often live on the same die (or substrate in a 2.5D process) and are optimized for power and size. Getting these domains to work together effective calls for an enhanced flow.
Historically, these domains have not played together … Read More
Is That PDK Safe to Use Yet?
In our semiconductor ecosystem we have foundries on one side supplying all of that amazing silicon technology, and IC designers on the other side that take their system ideas then go implement them in a SoC using a specific foundry. The required interface between foundry and chip designers has been the Process Design Kit (PDK), … Read More
Mentor Webinar Series: Integrating the Systems Engineering Flow
Product lifecycle management is probably not the most gripping topic for most design engineers. You want to get on with architecture, design, verification and implementation. But if you are building products for any safety-sensitive application in a car, a medical appliance, avionics, railway applications in Europe – to name… Read More


Five Billion Pulses Later: What DUV Optics Testing Reveals About Semiconductor Tool Uptime