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
Electronic Design Automation
EDPS Monterey. Agenda Now Available
For 20 years there has been the Electronic Design Process Symposium. It has been held each April and for the last few years at least has always been in Monterey at the Monterey Beach Resort. This year it is Thursday and Friday April 18th/19th.
The keynote on the first day is by Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx on The All-programmable SoC —… Read More
RTDA at Altera
I talked to Yaron Kretchmer of Altera to find out how they are using RTDA’s products. I believe that Altera are the oldest customer of RTDA, dating back over 15 years, originally used by the operations team around the test floor before propagating out in the EDA and software worlds more recently.
Altera use two RTDA tools, LicenceMonitor… Read More
Virtual Platforms, Acceleration, Emulation, FPGA Prototypes, Chips
At CDNLive today Frank Schirrmeister presented a nice overview of Cadence’s verification capabilities. The problem with verification is that you can’t have everything you want. What you really want is very fast runtimes, very accurate fidelity to the hardware and everything available very early in the design … Read More
Visually Debugging IC Designs for AMS and Mixed-Languages
With an HDL-based design methodology many IC engineers code in text languages like SystemVerilog and VHDL, so it’s only natural to use a text-based debug methodology. The expression that, “A picture is worth a thousand words” comes to my mind and in this case a visual debug approach is worth considering for … Read More
Cadence To Acquire Tensilica
You have probably already seen the news: Cadence is acquiring Tensilica for $380M. Cadence has been relatively late to the IP party compared to Synopsys. In contrast, Mentor was early, got into the IP business before it was really profitable and ended up shutting down the business.
Tensilica is quite sizable. It has over 200 licensees,… Read More
Sanjiv Kaul: Is HLS About to Take Off?
At the end of last week I talked to Sanjiv Kaul, the new CEO of Calypto. Just to give a little background for those that haven’t been following along at home, Calypto was founded to try and solve the very hard problem of sequential logical equivalence checking (mostly by people from the engineering team that I managed at Ambit).… Read More
We are Live at CDNLive 2013!
Dr. Paul McLellan and I will be covering CDNLive this week, one of the premier EDA events of the year. Take a look at the agenda and exhibits, this year it looks like a full on Design Automation Conference! There is definitely something for everyone!
Get ready for two full days of content with more than a hundred tracks and keynotes by… Read More
Reliability is the New Power
It has be come a cliche to say that “power is the new timing”, the thing that keeps designers up at night and drives the major architectural decisions in big SoCs. Nobody is saying it yet but perhaps “reliability is the new power” will be tomorrow’s received wisdom.
I talked to Adrian Evans of IROCTech… Read More
Tanner EDA v16 OpenAccess is here!
Tanner EDA is a pleasure to work with, they are big on collaboration and customers absolutely love their tools. With the Synopsys acquisition of SpringSoft, Tanner needs to step up and fill the void of the affordable Laker tools. Take a close look at their new v16 release and let me know how they are doing.
New capabilities for back-end… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography