DesignConis next week in Santa Clara, so today I spoke with Mark Ravenstahlfrom ANSYS to get an idea of what to expect at the conference and trade show.
Electronic Design Automation
You may want to check that known-good RTL
In his blog Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood wrote: “Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it’s not. Their job is to solve problems.” Whether the tool is HTML, C, or RTL, the reality is we are now borrowing or buying more software IP than ever, and integrating it into more complex designs,… Read More
Using IC Data Management Tools and Migrating Vendors
Non-volatile memory is used in a wide variety of consumer and industrial applications and comes in an array of architectures like Serial Flash and CBRAM (Conductive Bridging RAM). I caught up with Shane Hollmer by phone this week to gain some insight into a recent acquisition of Atmel’s serial flash components, and how that… Read More
Verdi: No Requiem for Openness
I sat down last week for lunch with Michael Sanie. Mike and I go back a long way, working together at VLSI Technology (where his first job out of school was to take over the circuit extractor that I’d originally written) and then in strategic marketing at Cadence. Now Mike has marketing for (almost?) all of Synopsys’s … Read More
New PCI Express 3.0 Equalization Requirements
PCI Express 3.0 increased the supported data rate to 8 Gbps, which effectively doubles the data rate supported by PCI Express 2.0. While the data rate was increased, no improvement was made to the channels. As such, an 8 Gbps channel in PCIe 3.0 experiences significantly more loss than one implemented in PCIe 2.0. To compensate for… Read More
First Time, Every Time
While this iconic advertising phrase was first used to describe the ink reliability of a ballpoint pen, it perfectly summarizes the average consumer’s attitude toward automobile reliability as well. We don’t really care how it’s done, as long as everything in our car works first time, every time. Even when that includes heated… Read More
Double Patterning for IC Design, Extraction and Signoff
TSMC and Synopsys hosted a webinar in December on this topic of double patterning and how it impacts the IC extraction flow. The 20nm process node has IC layout geometries so closely spaced that the traditional optical-based lithography cannot be used, instead lower layers like Poly and Metal 1 require a new approach of using two… Read More
What did CES 2013 mean for #SemiEDA?
CES is the preeminent gadget show, and in the LVCC South Hall a wave has been building for some time. It’s now the place where chipsets are introduced, and this year saw a wide range of introductions from Atmel, Bosch, Broadcom, Intel (OK, they’re still in Central Hall), InvenSense, Marvell, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, ST-Ericsson,… Read More
Yawn… New EDA Leader Results Are Coming
We will soon start to see the quarterly financial reporting installments of the “Big 3” public EDA companies. I predict they will be as boring as usual. I am not sure if I would want it any differently though.
Back in the 90s there were times when it was truly interesting to wait to see what Cadence, Mentor, or later Synopsys, might announce.… Read More
Oasys Has a New CEO
Scott Seaton is the new CEO of Oasys Design Systems. Paul van Besouw, the CEO since the company’s founding, becomes the CTO. I met Scott last year when I was doing some consulting work for Carbon Design where he was VP of sales (the new VP sales at Carbon is Hal Conklin, by the way).
I talked to Scott about why he had joined Oasys. … Read More
Weebit Nano Brings ReRAM Benefits to the Automotive Market