I first met Dundar Dumlugolat Barcelona Design back in 2004, so it was a pleasure to meet with him again at DAClast week and learn more about what his company Magwel has to offer IC designers of power management chips.… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
IP Accelerated (Bye Bye EDA 360)
Synopsys has been extremely active, during the last 10 years, not only launching new IP products every year, but also running an ambitious acquisition strategy, with no less than 8 acquisitions. Cascade acquisition bring PCI Express (controller only), when Accelerant bring SerDes (the earth of any PHY IP). The MIPS/Chipidea… Read More
ATopTech’s Legal Woes Continue!
It was a bad sign when an EDA company solicited John Cooley’s help in their legal challenge: See Did Atoptech Just Astroturf Synopsys? Gabe Moretti also did an article: John Cooley Barrister Chastises Synopsys | Gabe on EDA. An even worse sign is when your legal team gets disqualified, especially when that legal team is the top EDA… Read More
MEMS Update from DAC
DAC has an interesting mix of vendors each year, and some of them are outside of the expected digital, analog or IP space. Last Tuesday at DAC I visited a company called Coventor that has three product lines:
- MEMS+ – MEMS design and analysis tools
- CoventorWare – Modeling and simulation for MEMS devices
- SEMulator 3D–
An Update on Calibre at DAC
Even though I live just 7 miles away from the Mentor Graphics corporate office in Oregon, I visited their DAC suite in San Francisco last week to get an update on Calibrefrom Michael White. The Calibre tools are used during IC verification and sign-off by performing DRC (Design Rule Checking) and LVS (Layout Versus Schematic).… Read More
A Re-look at TI’s Businesses, Strategies & Future
In recent days I’ve seen several long discussions about Texas Instrumentslosing its grip in semiconductor industry when it came out of a business it was strong in, i.e. wireless business. It seems the semiconductor community has not digested the fact that TI, very rightly, came out of the OMAP business at the right time. The smartphone… Read More
Embedded Vision Summit
I was a the embedded vision conference last week. Jeff Beir, the founder of the embedded vision alliance gave an introduction to the field. The conference was much bigger than previous years and almost everyone is designing some sort of vision product. Half of your brain is used for vision so it goes without saying that vision requires… Read More
SystemC: User Group update from DAC
I always enjoy attending the SystemC User group to see what is being done by users of SystemC. This time was no exception. Not only is it FREE, but the professional networking around the meeting, presentations, and break times are terrific.
There were 5 paper presentations at the North American SystemC User Group (NASCUG) on Monday,… Read More
Synopsys Galaxy Platform & Lynx Design System supports FD-SOI
This is a new brick that Synopsys brings to build FD-SOI credibility. We have talked at Semiwiki about FD-SOI technology developed by the LETI and STM, and recently endorsed by Samsung Foundry, offering a more than credible second source to STM. And we have said that the FD-SOI introduction will need to be supported by EDA and IP vendors… Read More
Non-separation of power and performance
How much power does a system consume? The simplistic path to power estimation for a system used to be tossing a few metrics – standby, typical, worst case, with figures pulled from a datasheet, simulation, or physical measurement – into a spreadsheet. After filling the remaining holes with SWAG (scientific wild-ass guesses), … Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet