We often think of EDA vendors competing with each other and using proprietary data formats to make it difficult for users to mix and match tools, or even create efficient flows of tools. At the recent DAC event in San Francisco I was pleasantly surprised to hear that two EDA vendors decided to cooperate instead of create incompatible… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Imec’s An Steegen Talks Future Process Technology
I’m an An Steegen groupie. Once or twice a year I see a presentation by her and it is a great summary in a ridiculously short period of time of all the potential upcoming semiconductor technologies. Yesterday was my annual fix at the imec Technology Forum (ITF). Today I got to sit down with her at the conference center.
An is different… Read More
Synopsys Vision on Custom Automation with FinFET
In an overwhelmingly digital world, there is a constant cry about the analog design process being slow, not automated, going at its own pace in the same old fashion, and so on. And, the analog world is not happy with the way it’s getting dragged into imperfect automation so it can be more like the digital world. True, the analog world… Read More
Bijan Kiani Talks Synopsys Custom Layout and More
Last week I sat down and talked to Bijan Kiani of Synopsys. He has marketing responsibility for design implementation products at Synopsys spanning digital, custom and analog mixed signal (AMS).
He was born in Iran and after high school he moved to the UK. He got his PhD degree from University of Edinburgh. It turns out that I was doing… Read More
Predicting Lifetime of Analog ICs
With the increase of transistors per unit area, high density interconnects and manufacturing variability at lower nodes, the electronic devices have become more vulnerable to failures. The devices that operate under extreme conditions such as automotive devices that operate at high temperatures need to be robust enough to… Read More
SEMulator3D on Silicon Cloud International
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about Silicon Cloud International (SCI). Their mission is to help smaller countries that have targeted semiconductor design as a way to move up the technology ladder from low-cost manufacturing. Last year everything was in the future but SCI now have their first two centers up and running. The first,… Read More
Unlock the Key to Ultra-Low Power Design
We have been hearing about low power for a long time. Fortunately, low power chip operation has come about through a large number of innovations. Key among these is clock gating, frequency and voltage scaling, managing leakage with lower threshold voltage, HKMG, and many other techniques. But we are entering the age of ultra low… Read More
An Universe of Formats for IP Validation
Although I knew about Crossfire’s capabilities for signing off quality of an IP before its integration into an SoC, there was much more to learn about this tool when I visited Fractal Technologies booth during this DAC. The complexity handled by this tool to qualify any type of IP for its integration into an SoC can be imagined by the… Read More
IBM Design Tools in the Cloud: Big News or Old News?
One announcement that I missed coming up to the Design Automation Conference last week was that SiCAD is hosting a portfolio of IBM’s design automation tools in the cloud. Supposedly these are priced half the cost of similar capability from Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor. So should the big three be worried? Is this an earth-shattering… Read More
Solido Has Perfected the Emerging EDA Company Business Model!
Last year at #51DAC we gave away more than a thousand printed versions of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor industry.” This year we gave away pens with a light and stylus. My friends at Solido Design gave away 600 pens in their booth and we gave away another 400 at our DAC reception on Wednesday night. Solido… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?