For the last several years, people have predicted the end of Moore’s Law. The reasoning is that there is a limit at which one can’t shrink transistors any further. A reoccurring comment has been “You can’t divide an atom.” I had assumed that its demise would be at the hands of a new paradigm like quantum computing. Now, with Intel’s … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
When Good Standards Get Lost – the UVM Register Model
Some time ago I wrote a DeepChip viewpoint on DVCON 2014 in which I praised a Mentor paper “Of Camels and Committees”. The authors argued that while the UVM standards committee had a done a great job in the early releases, the 1.2 release was overloaded with nice-to-have features with questionable value for a standard, particularly… Read More
Coventor ASML IMEC: The last half nanometer
On Tuesday evening December 8[SUP]th[/SUP] at IEDM, Coventor held a panel discussion entitled the “The last half nanometer”. Coventor is a leading provider of simulation software used to design processes. This is my third year attending the Coventor panel discussion at IEDM and they are always excellent with very strong panels… Read More
Decisive Floorplanning for Faster Design Closure
Semiconductor design automation at system level is gaining its due importance today. It needs an effective, efficient, and seamless flow from system up to silicon. There is lot of effort going on for automating SoC design exploration at system level but that eventually stops at RTL; another level of flow automation takes over … Read More
Synopsys on the Future of Custom Layout!
Analog and mixed signal design has received more than their fair share of attention since the mobile revolution and now that FinFETs are in production at the foundries I see that trend continuing. As a result this year there are some interesting things brewing in EDA, especially in the area of Custom Layout.
Innovation in Custom … Read More
IBM’s OpenPOWER Presence Was Felt Heavily At SuperComputing ’15
IBM is in the process of reinventing themselves as a company, changing how they see themselves, what they do as a company and how they want their partners and customers to view them. This is exemplified best in their mobile alliance with Apple, their Watson cognitive efforts, the sale of their chip fab to GlobalFoundries, the sale… Read More
Maybe not the world, but schedules got eaten
It has been almost five years since Marc Andreessen wrote the words, “Software is eating the world.” The premise of his essay in the Wall Street Journal in 2011 was pretty simple: the technology world has seen its intrinsic value shift from hardware to software. New all-software names have appeared on the list of high flying companies,… Read More
AMD’s GPUOpen Initiative Architected To Move The Industry In A Different Direction
GPUOpen is a new initiative started by Advanced Micro Devices’ Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) as a way for the company to continue to reach out to the needs to developers by giving them a better development environment. The idea behind GPUOpen is born out of the work that Advanced Micro Device’s did with Mantle, their own low-level… Read More
Semiconductor IP Comes of Age
I love reading about good news in the EDA and Semiconductor IP space, especially in light of the recent stock market trending downward in January. The best news that I’ve read in the past week is about the Q3 2015 revenue numbers collected by EDAC, because it shows that Semiconductor IP (SIP) surpassed CAE tool revenues for … Read More
Advanced Micro Devices’s Head Of Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, Talks About Their Future
Since Advanced Micro Devices announced their new Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), many have wondered what direction the graphics division would go with its new-found autonomy. The new RTG group within Advanced Micro Devices is still a wholly-owned division of the company but still potentially ripe for acquisition or spinoff.… Read More
AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification