Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have said “the rich are not like other people” to Ernest Hemingway (he didn’t). In the same way, processors are not like other blocks, and not because they have more gates (they don’t). However, special approaches to optimizing processors are important because the clock… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Debugging Verification Constraints
In his DAC keynote last year (2012) Mike Mueller of ARM compared how much CPU was required to verify the first ARM versus one of the latest ARM Cortex CPUs. Of course the newer CPU is hundreds of times larger than the first ARM but the amount of verification required was millions of times as much, requiring ARM to construct their own datacenter… Read More
Around the World in 80 Engineers…Actually Well Over 200
Atrenta today announced Dr Ajith Pasqual, who is the Head of the Department of Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka (which used to be known as Ceylon) has joined Atrenta’s technical advisory board (TAB). OK, academics join EDA company’s TABs all the time so that’s… Read More
The fixed and the finite: QoR in FPGAs
There is an intriguingly amorphous term in FPGA design circles lately: Quality of Results, or QoR. Fitting a design in an FPGA is just the start – is a design optimal in real estate, throughput, power consumption, and IP reuse? Paradoxically, as FPGAs get bigger and take on bigger signal processing problems, QoR has become a larger… Read More
Efficient Power Analysis and Reduction at RTL Level
It’s a classic and creative example of design and EDA tool community getting together, exploiting tool capabilities and developing flows which add value to all stake holders including the end consumer. We know power has become extremely important for battery life in smart phones, high performance servers, workstations, notebooks… Read More
New Book on Design Constraints
There is a new book out from Springer. The subtitle is actually a better description that the title. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to Synopsys Design Constraints (SDC) but the title isConstraining Designs for Synthesis and Timing Analysis. The authors are Sridhar Gangadharan of Atrenta in San Jose and Sanjay Churiwala of Xilinx… Read More
Configurable System IP from a Tool Provider
While I have previously blogged on Forte’s Cynthesizer Workbench’s Interface Generator, I want to take another look from a different perspective. Watching the tool and IP together in action through public videos provided by Forte it struck me as odd what I did not consider earlier, on what should have been obvious to me – Forte is… Read More
Oasys Bakes a PIE
One challenge in building a modern SoC is that you want to minimize power, performance and area (PPA) while still getting your chip to market on schedule. Realistically, you can’t actually minimize all of these at once since they are tradeoffs: speeding up a critical path often involves upsizing drivers to larger cells which… Read More
Mixed Signal SOC verification Webinar
When looking at the time to design and verify an SoC we’ve known for many years now that the verification effort requires more time than the design process. So anything that will shorten the verification effort will have the biggest impact on keeping your project on schedule.
A second trend is the amount of Analog content in… Read More
VIA Adopts Cliosoft
VIA Telecom, who makes CDMA base-band processor chips, picked ClioSoft SOS for use by its analog mixed-signal design teams. Like many such teams they use Cadence’s Virtuoso layout platform. ClioSoft’s SOS is seamlessly integrated into Virtuoso so that designers don’t really need to spend much time worrying… Read More


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