I first visited STat their Agrate, Italy site where Flash memory development is done. At DACthis year Antonio Bogani talked about how ST designs with LDE while using EDA tools and a PDK (Process Design Kit) from Cadence. They recorded the 17 minute presentation, and you can view it herewithout having to register. Antonio’s… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
EDAC Mixer, Kaufman and More. All Things EDAC
The next monthly EDAC mixer is next week on Thursday 23rd October from 6-8pm. It will be at the Sonoma Chicken Coop at 90 Skyport Drive in San Jose (right next to where Magma used to be and Atmel is). So come along and mingle with industry peers, all the the benefit of local charities. You don’t need to donate, just pay for your food… Read More
Proving the Power of Virtual Fabrication
There are many facets of our lives that are being driven to a more virtual method of doing things. This is largely due to issues such as scaling due to whatever reason – technical, business, economic. Let’s look at some general cases: In yesteryears people used to travel all the way for face-to-face meetings; today virtual meetings… Read More
TSMC ♥ Cadence!
One of the questions I routinely ask amongst the fabless semiconductor ecosystem is, “How are the EDA vendors doing?” There are always complaints because, let’s face it, we all like to complain. On occasion however I do hear about a vendor who goes above and beyond the call of duty and it really brightens my day.
Of late,… Read More
What’s next in test compression?
If you’ll be at ITC TestWeek in Seattle (Oct 20-23), here’s one event you don’t want to miss: a technology reception hosted by Mentor, with Janusz Rajski and Nilanjan Mukherjee as the featured speakers. It is free to ITC attendees and you can register here. [If for some crazy reason you haven’t registered for ITC yet, do that… Read More
Full-Chip Electromigration Analysis
I’ll never forget debugging my first DRAM chip at Intel, peering into a microscope and watching the aluminum interconnect actually bubble and dissolve as the voltage was increased, revealing the destructive effects of Electromigration (EM) failure. That was back in 1980 using 6 um, single level metal technology, so imagine… Read More
Maker Movement Embraced by Major Semiconductor Companies
In 2005 with the development of the Arduino, everything changed for people building things that required a microcontroller. The Arduino brought with it a low price standard, and open, hardware platform and an easy to use open source development environment. It was … Read More
StarVision to Debug and Analyze Designs at All Levels
In today’s SoC world where multiple analog and digital blocks along with IPs at different levels of abstractions are placed together on a single chip, debugging at all levels becomes quite difficult and clumsy. While one is working at the top level and needs to investigate a particular connection at an intermediate hierarchical… Read More
10nm, the View from IBM
On the Cadence booth at DAC, Lars Liebmann of IBM presented on the challenges of 10nm. As he put it, how the lithography folks are keeping things very interesting for the EDA tool development engineers. Although 14nm/16nm hasn’t yet ramped into HVM, the advanced work for tools and IP has all moved to 10nm. Although Lars gave… Read More
Key Collaboration to Enable Designs at Advanced Nodes
In the semiconductor ecosystem, several partners (or better to say stakeholders) join together in the overall value chain to finally output the most coveted chip, err I should say SoC these days. It becomes really interesting when we start analyzing the real value added by each of them, none appears to be less. Well, then to whom … Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification