I’ve taught Verilog classes and used logic synthesis tools for ASIC and FPGA designs, so was interested to hear about Oasys Design Systems. I attended their webinar at 9AM today, so I’ll share what I learned about their approach to logical and physical synthesis. This approach competes with tools like Design Compiler… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
IP vendors enable SuperSpeed USB IP take off in 2012
SuperSpeed USB has been clearly ranked in the Interface protocols winner list, see this previous post. It could be interesting to dig into this IP market segment, determine in which applications USB 3.0 has been successfully deployed and who are the IP vendors serving this market, enabling SuperSpeed USB to take off.
SuperSpeed… Read More
ESD Check Methodology
In Pune at the start of the month, Norman Chang, Ting-Sheng Ku, Jai Pollayil of Apache/Ansys and NVIDIA presented and ESD check methodologywith Fast Full-chip Static and Macro-level Dynamic Solutions . ESD stands for Elecro-Static Discharge and is basically injecting very high static voltages (think how your hand gets charged… Read More
Predictions are hard, especially about the future
I was asked to make some predictions about the EDA, semiconductor and electronic systems markets for 2013. I decided that it would be more fun to make some plausible predictions, some of which will be right, rather than go for anodyne predictions (“Cadence will acquire a couple of startups”) which are uninformative,… Read More
A Brief History of Synopsys DesignWare ® IP
Let’s play word association. I say “EDA”, you immediately think “Synopsys”. I say “IP” and although 15 years ago you may not, today, you think “Synopsys”. For nearly two decades, Synopsys has grown its IP business through both organic development and acquisition, with a clear focus on enabling designers to meet their time-to-market… Read More
Reducing Dynamic and Static Power in Memories
Sequential approaches to power reduction work well on logic implemented using standard cells. But part of every SoC, sometimes a very large part, is taken up with embedded memories for which alternative approaches are required. Not only do these memories occupy up to half of the area they also account for as much as 75% of the power… Read More
Global Design Closure
Satish Soman, chief solutions architect at Atrenta, was invited to give a presentation on Global Design Closure at the VLSI India conference in Pune at the start of this month. He talked about the need to close the gap between the typical SoC development methodology and what happens in reality.
SoCs are really put together in two … Read More
IC Design at Analog Bits
This morning I spoke with Mahesh Tirupattur, Executive VP of Analog Bits about IC design challenges and using EDA tools to create high performance, mixed-signal semiconductor IP.
Online Schematic Capture and SPICE Circuit Simulation
I love all things SPICE so when I read a tweet tonight from @PartSimI just had to try out their Schematic Capture and SPICE circuit simulator in a browser. The site is www.partsim.com and all you need is a web browser and short registration process, then it’s off to the Examples where I found a simple CMOS inverter and then extended… Read More
Engineer to Engineer, Embedded Instrumentation
Last month the folks at Tektronix did something very useful, they invited 30 engineers to talk directly with their chief engineer of embedded instrumentation as part of “Meet the Experts” in Santa Clara, CA.
Brad Quinton, Chief Architect created a new and efficient approach of embedding instrumentation in your … Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment