Yesterday Cadence had their annual front-end summit, the theme of which was physically aware design. I was especially interested in the first couple of presentations about physically aware synthesis. I joined Cadence in 1999 when they acquired Ambit Design Systems. One of the products that we had in development was called PKS… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
What Makes A Designer’s Day? A Bottleneck Solved!
In an environment of SoCs with tough targets of multiple functionalities, smallest size, lowest power and fastest performance to achieve within a limited design cycle window in order to meet the rigid time-to-market requirements, any day spent without success becomes very frustrating for a designer. Especially during tape-out… Read More
SPICE Development Roadmap 2013!
The MOS-AK/GSA Modeling Working Group, a global compact modeling standardization forum, delivered its annual autumn compact modeling workshop on Sept. 20, 2013 as an integral part of the ESSDERC/ESSCIRC Conference in Bucharest (RO). The event received full sponsorship from leading industrial partners including Agilent… Read More
Cadence & ARM Optimize Complex SoC Performance
Now a day, a SoC can be highly complex, having 100s of IPs performing various functionalities along with multi-core CPUs on it. Managing power, performance and area of the overall semiconductor design in the SoC becomes an extremely challenging task. Even if the IPs and various design blocks are highly optimized within themselves,… Read More
Webinar: Parasitic Debugging made easy!
We cordially invite you to attend this webinar and learn how to quickly debug post layout designs. Concept Engineering is a privately held company based in Freiburg, Germany. It was, founded in 1990 to develop and market innovative schematic generation and viewing technology for use with logic synthesis, verification, test … Read More
Simplified Assertion Adoption with SystemVerilog 2012
SystemVerilog as an assertion language improved and simplified with the 2012 version compared to the 2005 version. I recently viewed a webinar on SystemVerilog 2012 by consultant Srinivasan Venkataramanan, who works at CVC Pvt. Ltd. There’s been a steep learning-curve for assertions in the past, and hopefully you’ll… Read More
Conquering errors in the hierarchy of FPGA IP
FPGA design today involves not only millions of gates on the target device, but thousands of source files with RTL and constraints, often generated by multiple designers or third party IP providers. With modules organized in some logical way describing the design, designers brace themselves for synthesis and a possible avalanche… Read More
Because X doesn’t always mark the exact spot
Digital hardware has a habit of deciding – based on the bias and behavior of transistors – to drive outputs to a 0, or a 1, or if commanded a high-impedance Z state. SystemVerilog recognizes a fourth state: X, the “unknown” state a simulator has trouble inferring.
Simulators have a choice. Under X-optimism, they can convert the unknown… Read More
Lithography: Future Technologies
The first part of Lars Liebmann’s ICCAD keynote about lithography was on the changes in lithography that have to us to where we are today. In some ways it was an explanation of why we have the odd design rules, double patterning etc that we have in 20nm and 16nm processes. The second part of his talk was a look forward to how we might… Read More
Semiconductor Process Development: A View from the Trenches at IEDM
There is always a lot of posturing and pontificating when semiconductor executives talk about the future of process development. They are fighting an air war of perception and investor expectations, so naturally want to make sure they have plenty to brag about. But, as we pointed out recently with Intel’s problems at 14nm, moving… Read More
Selling the Forges of the Future: U.S. Report Exposes China’s Reliance on Western Chip Tools