In last 3 decades of semiconductor market, the largest growth in IC sales was at 33% in 2010. At that time global recession had started due to financial crisis and in 2009 oil prices fell more than 30%. It appeared that oil prices were negatively correlated with semiconductor market growth. Today again there is another sharp decline… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Synopsys’ New Circuit Simulation Environment Improves Productivity — for Free
When technology advances, complexities increase and data size becomes unmanageable. Fresh thinking and a new environment for automation are needed to provide the required increase in productivity. Specifically in case of circuit simulation of advanced-node analog designs, where precision is paramount and a large number… Read More
How 16nm and 14nm FinFETs Require New SPICE Simulators
About 35 years ago the first commercial SPICE circuit simulators emerged and they were quickly put to work helping circuit designers predict the timing and power of 6um NMOS designs. Then we had to limit our circuit simulations to just hundreds of transistors and interconnect elements to fit into the RAM and complete simulation… Read More
Let’s Reduce Wasted Energy in Server Farms
With the growth in streaming video and the promises of 50 billion IoT gadgets making our lives oh-so-much better, there is an alarming demand for online computational horsepower and bandwidth.
Why alarming? In 2014, data centers in the United States consumed approximately 100 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. According… Read More
Qualcomm goes in Data Center thanks to Google
The Server SoC at the heart of Data Center almost don’t care about power consumption, at the opposite of Application Processors for smartphone. If you design a server multi-core SoC, you target the highest performance, in fact a combination of high frequency and lowest possible latency, and try to pack as many CPU core and embedded… Read More
Supernovae and Safety
Whenever we push the bounds of reliability in any domain, we run into new potential sources of error. Perhaps not completely new, but rather concerns new to that domain. That’s the case for Single Event Upsets (SEUs) which are radiation-triggered bit-flips, and Single Event Transients (SETs) which are radiation-triggered pulses… Read More
Pathfinding to an Optimal Chip/Package/Board Implementation
A new term has entered the vernacular of electronic design engineering — pathfinding. The complexity of the functionality to be integrated and the myriad of chip, package, and board technologies available make the implementation decision a daunting task. Pathfinding refers to the method by which the design space of technology… Read More
Cadence Adds New Dimension to SoC Test Solution
It requires lateral thinking in bringing new innovation into conventional solutions to age-old hard problems. While the core logic design has evolved adding multiple functionalities onto a chip, now called SoC, the structural composition of DFT (Design for Testability) has remained more or less same based on XOR-based compression… Read More
Updated tool cuts through DO-254 V&V chaos
Audits. The mere mention of the word keeps project managers up at night and sends most designers running. However, in the case of FPGA designs seeking DO-254 compliance, the product doesn’t ship until the audit is complete – there is no avoiding it, or skating around it.… Read More
Expanding 3D EM Simulation Access to All
James Clerk Maxwell’s eponymous equations are the basis for simulating electromagnetic wave propagation. In school, EE majors tended to fall into two camps: (a) those that thoroughly enjoyed their fields and waves classes, who liked doing surface integrals, and who were adept at demonstrating the “right hand rule”, and (b) … Read More
AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification