At IEDM last week Coventor hosted a panel session as they do each year. The theme this year was surviving variation. The panel was hosted by someone whose name is familiar round here, Dan Nenni. The panel that Coventor had put together had people from all sorts of different slots in the design/supply chain for semiconductor. Unfortunately… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Last VIP News of 2014
It’s likely that most of the current Semiwiki readers didn’t read this article posted in 2011, comparing Cadence and Synopsys with the Soviet Union and the USA, sharing the world in 1944 during the Yalta Conference. I was explaining in my post that Synopsys’s strong influence was on Design IP when Cadence’s preferred domain was … Read More
Results of TSMC’s ECO Fill Flow
By Jeff Wilson, Mentor Graphics and Anderson Chiu, TSMC
At this year’s TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Ecosystem Forum, Mentor Graphics and TSMC co-presented some results of the ECO Fill flow developed for TSMC customers working at advanced nodes. Here is a summary of the presentation. (TSMC customers can access the presentation… Read More
Ensuring Safety Distinctive Design & Verification
In today’s world where every device functions intelligently, it automatically becomes active on any kind of stimulus. The problem with such intelligence is that it can function unfavorably on any kind of bad stimulus. As the devices are complex enough in the form of SoCs (which at advanced process nodes are more susceptible to … Read More
Verilog-AMS connects T-SPICE and Riviera-PRO
With advances in available IP, mixed signal design has become much easier. Mixed signal verification on the other hand is becoming more complicated. More complexity means more simulation, and in the analog domain, SPICE-based techniques grinding away on transistor models take a lot of precious time. Event-driven methods like… Read More
An Approach to Top-Down SoC Verification
We’ve blogged dozens of times about UVM– Universal Verification Methodology at SemiWiki, and all of the major EDA vendors support UVM, so you may be lulled into thinking that UVM is totally adequate for top-down SoC verification. Yesterday I had a phone discussion with Frank Schirrmeister of Cadence about a new approach… Read More
A Brief History of Silicon Frontline
Silicon Frontline was founded in 2007 by Yuri Feinberg. Since then the company has built up a team with expertise in computational geometry, circuit layout, circuit simulation and analysis, and post-layout verification. After a small initial funding, Silicon Frontline has continued to grow, acquiring new customers even over… Read More
Expert Tool to Easily Debug RTL and Reuse in SoCs
SoC design these days has become a complex and tricky phenomenon involving integration of multiple IPs and legacy RTL code which could be in different languages, sourced from various third parties across the globe. Understanding and reusing RTL code is imperative in SoC integration which needs capable tools that can accommodate… Read More
How are the IoT and ESL Related?
A recent comment by a DACattendee mentioned that the IoT acronym was so over-used as to make him get upset at EDA vendors that all purport to be enabling the growing IoT revolution. One of the most common requirements that I hear about IoT electronics is that the power needs to be well understood and controlled during the design exploration… Read More
Virtual Emulation Extends Debugging Over Physical
Amid burgeoning complexity of SoC verification with ever increasing hardware, software and firmware content, verification engineers are hard pressed with learning multiple tools, technologies and methodologies and still completing SoC verification with full accuracy in time. The complexity, size and diversity of SoC … Read More
Why I Think Intel 3.0 Will Succeed