Yesterday evening was the annual EDAC CEO forecast meeting. Actually it is not really a forecast meeting any more, more a sort of CEO response to some survey questions asked of EDAC members. Rich Valera of Needham moderated with Lip-Bu, Aart and Wally, along with Simon Segars representing the IP arm(!) of the business and Raul Camposano… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Visual Debugging at Altera on Billion-Transistor Chips
My first job out of college was doing transistor-level circuit design, so I’m always curious about how companies are doing billion-transistor chip design and debug these days at the FPGA companies.
I spoke with Yaron Kretchmer,he works at Altera and manages the engineering infrastructure group where they have a compute… Read More
Costello on Communicating a Compelling Company Story
The next EDAC sponsored emerging company series (what I’ve been calling Hogan University) is Joe Costello being interviewed on how to communicate a compelling company story. Anyone who saw Joe’s keynote at DAC several years ago will not want to miss this. I can’t promise that he’ll lie down on the stage… Read More
IJTAG for IP Test: a free seminar
What: Better IP Test with IJTAG
When: 26 March, 2013, 10:30am-1:30pm
Where: Mentor Graphics, 46871 Bayside Parkway, Fremont, CA 94538
If you are involved in IC test*, you’ve probably heard about the IEEE P1687 standard, called IJTAG for ‘internal’ JTAG. IJTAG defines a standard for embedded IP that includes simple… Read More
ARM Cortex SoC Prototyping Platform for Industrial Applications
If your next SoC uses an ARM Cortex-A9 and has an industrial application, then you can save much design and debug time by using a prototyping platform. The price to prototype is quite affordable, and the methodology has a short learning curve. Bill Tomasan Aldec Research Engineer conducted a webinar today on: ARM Cortex SoC Prototyping… Read More
Synopsys ♥ TSMC!
Dr. Paul McLellan and I will be covering the Silicon Valley SNUG live again this year. Unfortunately we are only allowed to see the keynotes (same thing with CDNLive) but they look very good:
Keynote Address: Massive Innovation and Collaboration into the “GigaScale” Age!
Aart de Geus, Chairman and co-CEO, Synopsys,… Read More
Will next generation Mobile Devices support PCI Express? M-PCIe is coming fast!
Those who have read the numerous articles I have written about MIPI, or PCIe, or the fusion of both named “Mobile Express” know my position: the question is not “Will Mobile devices support PCI Express?” but “When will we see Mobile devices integrating Mobile Express?” I was not really surprised by the Press Release that Cadence … Read More
Formal Verification of Power Intent
I can’t imagine that any SoC today is designed without taking intense interest in how much power the chip will consume, whether it is destined for a mobile phone or tethered in a cloud datacenter. One challenge with power is that adding features like voltage islands or power-down areas require changes to the netlist such as… Read More
Standard Cell Library Characterization
Standard cell library characterization has been around for decades, Synopsys has been offering Liberty NCXand Cadence has Virtuoso Foundation IP Characterization. What’s new is that Mentor Graphics acquired the Z Circuit technology for library characterization and has integrated it with the Eldo Classic circuit … Read More
Ensuring timing of Custom Designs with large embedded memories – A big burden has solution!
In 1990s when designs were small, I was seeing design and EDA community struggling to improve upon huge time taken to verify the circuits, specifically with Spice and the like. I was myself working on developing tool for transistor level static timing analysis (STA) mainly to gain on time (eliminating the need of exhaustive set … Read More
Real men have fabs!