If we check the many articles daily published in Semiwiki, I am sure that Moore’s Law has been mentioned every single day. There is a good reason why we constantly write about new technologies and advanced features like FinFet, FD-SOI, 450 mm wafers or double patterning: all of these are new challenges that the SC industry will have… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
What’s in your network processor?
Recently, one of those very restrained press releases – in this case, Mentor Graphics and Imagination Technologiesextending their partnership for MIPS software support– crossed my desk with about 10% of the story. The 90% of this story I want to focus on is why Mentor is putting energy into this partnership… Read More
Cutting Debug Time of an SoC
The amount of time spent debugging an SoC dwarfs the actual design time, with many engineering teams saying that debug and verification takes about 7X the effort as the actual design work. So any automation to reduce the amount of time spent in debug and verification would directly impact the product schedule in a big way.
An example… Read More
A Brief History of Magillem
Founders
Cyril Spasevski is the President, CTO and founding engineer at Magillem, bringing a team of engineers, all experts with an SoC platform builder tool. In 2006 Cyril and his team met a seasoned business woman, and decided to form Magillem. Design teams were struggling with different tools at different stages of the flow,… Read More
Early Test –> Less Expensive, Better Health, Faster Closure
I am talking about the health of electronic and semiconductor design, which if made sound at RTL stage, can set it right for the rest of the design cycle for faster closure and also at lesser cost. Last week was the week of ITC(International Test Conference) for the Semiconductor and EDA community. I was looking forward to what ITC… Read More
Mentor Teaches Us About the Higg’s Boson
Once a year Mentor has a customer appreciation event in Silicon Valley with a guest speaker on some aspect of science. This is silicon valley, after all, so we all have to be geeks. This year it was Dr Sean Carroll from CalTech on The Particle at the End of the Universe, the Hunt for The Higg’s Boson and What’s Next.
Wally … Read More
EDAC Export Seminar: Don’t Know This Stuff…Go Directly to Jail…Do Not Pass Go
I am not making this up: All exports from the United States of EDA software and services are controlled under the Export Administration Regulations, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). You need to understand these regulations. Failure to comply can result in severe … Read More
How to Design an LTE Modem
Designing an LTE modem is an interesting case study in architectural and system level design because it is pretty much on the limit of what is possible in a current process node such as 28nm. I talked to Johannes Stahl of Synopsys about how you would accomplish this with the Synopsys suite of system level tools. He is the first to admit… Read More
Analog Characterization Environment (ACE)
I’m looking forward to the 2013 TSMC Open Innovation Platform Ecosystem Forum to be held Oct. 1[SUP]st[/SUP] in San Jose. One paper in particular that has my attention is titled, “An Efficient and Accurate Sign-Off Simulation Methodology for High-Performance CMOS Image Sensors,” by Berkeley Design Automation & … Read More
Emerging Trend – Choose DRAM as per Your Design Need
Lately I was studying about new innovations in memory world such as ReRAM and Memristor. As DRAM (although it has become a commodity) has found its extensive use in mobile, PC, tablet and so on, that was an inclination too to know more about. While reviewing Cadence’s offering in memory subsystems, I came across this whitepaperwhich… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot