Interesting to note; our cell phones today have more computing power than NASA had for the first landing on the moon. The insides of these mobile devices that we can’t live without are not like personal computers or even laptops with a traditional CPU (central processing unit) and a dozen other support chips. The brain, heart, and… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
SystemVerilog from Nevada?
When I think of EDA companies the first geography that comes to mind is Silicon Valley because of the rich history of semiconductor design and fabrication, being close to your customers always makes sense. In the information era it shouldn’t matter so much where you develop EDA tools, so there has been a gradual shift to a wider… Read More
40 Billion Smaller Things On The Clock
Big processors get all the love, it seems. It’s natural, since they are highly complex beasts and need a lot of care and feeding in the EDA and fab cycle. But the law of large numbers is starting to shift energy in the direction of optimizing microcontrollers.
I mulled the math in my head for a while. In a world with 7 billion people and … Read More
Chip-Package-System Solution Center
One of the really big changes about chip design is the way over the last decade or so it is no longer possible to design an SoC, a package for it to go in and the board for the package using different sets of tools and methodologies and then finally bond out the chip and solder it onto the board. The three systems, Chip-Package-System have… Read More
Ajoy Bose and Hogan: SoC Realization
Tomorrow night in Sunnyvale at the National Institute of Technology Alumni meeting, Ajoy Bose and Jim Hogan will talk about different aspects of SoC Realization. I’ve been saying for some time that design is changing and the block level is really where the action is. That is the right level to put together a virtual platform… Read More
Interview with Brien Anderson, CAD Engineer
I first met Brien Anderson on LinkedIn because we share common groups and interests, so I decided to interview him and discover how CAD tools enabled IC design at Synpatics, a company with capacitive sensing technology used in smart phones, tablets and touch screens.… Read More
A Brief History of SPICE
SPICE is an acronym for Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis and represents a class of EDA software used by circuit designers at the transistor-level to predict the timing, frequency, voltage, current or power of an IC or interconnect before fabrication.
In 1971 there was a tool called CANCER (Computer Analysis… Read More
While you’re reading the SoC manual
There was a day, not too long ago, when a software developer could be intimate with a processor through understanding its register set. Before coding, developers would reach for a manual, digging through pages and pages of 1s and 0s with defined functions to find how to gain control over the processor and its capability. One bit set… Read More
Measuring the Accuracy of a 3D Field Solver for IC Extraction
At SemiWiki we’ve blogged before about 3D field solvers and the different approaches that trade off accuracy, speed and capacity:… Read More
A Brief History of EDA
Electronic Design Automation, or more affectionately known as EDA, is a relatively young $5B industry with a very colorful upbringing, one that I have experienced firsthand, I’m very grateful for, and is an honor to write about. Today EDA employs an estimated 27,000 people! There is a nice EDA Wikipedia page which can be found here… Read More
Speculative Execution: Rethinking the Approach to CPU Scheduling