The days following a major conference like DAC are a good time to reflect on the overall health and vibrancy of the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. I’ve been in EDA for 21 years and built two successful startups, and over the last couple of years, have witnessed some decline in both new talent and in venture investment… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
What’s new with HSPICE at DAC?
One year ago I met with Hany Elhak of Synopsys to get an update on what was new with HSPICE in 2011, so this year at DAC Hany met me at the Synopsys booth for a quick update.
HSPICE has something called Precision Parallel so with 16 cores your IC circuit simulations will have about 10 x speed up compared to a single core.… Read More
TSMC Threater Presentation: Solido Design Automation!
For a small company, Solido has some very large customers and partners, TSMC being on of them. Why? Because of the high yield and memory performance demand on leading edge technologies, that’s why.
Much has been made of and will continue to be said on the march of Moore’s Law. While economics of scale and performance vs. power… Read More
Samsung, Synopsys, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and ARM at DAC
Tuesday morning at DAC I attended the Synopsys-hosted breakfast to hear from foundries and ARM about the challenges of designing and delivering silicon at the 32nm/28nm and 20nm nodes.
… Read MoreCadence IP Strategy 2012
As I mentioned in a previous blog Cadence Update 2012, Martin Lund is now in charge of the Cadence IP strategy. Martin read my first blog and wanted to exchange IP strategies so we met at DAC 2012 for a chat. Not only did Martin connect with me on LinkedIn, he also joined the SemiWiki LinkedIn group, which now has 4,000+ members. So yes,… Read More
TSMC Theater Presentation: Ciranova!
Ciranova presented a hierarchical custom layout flow used on several large advanced-node designs to reduce total layout time by about 50%. Ciranova itself does automated floorplanning and placement software with only limited routing; but since the first two constitute the majority of custom layout time, and strongly influence… Read More
Genevi, isn’t that a city in Switzerland?
I got an email from Mentor Embedded this morning about a webinar on Implementing a GENIVI-compliant System. I have to admit I had no idea what GENIVI is, which surprised me. I spent several years working in the embedded space and so I usually have at least a 50,000 foot view of most things going on there. One reason for my ignorance is … Read More
Fast Monte Carlo from Infiniscale at DAC
Firas Mohamed, President and CEO (Ph.D.) of Infiniscale met with me on Monday at DAC to provide an overview of what EDA software they offer to IC designers at the transistor-level.
Vision – analog flow that Monte Carlo simulation is required, which is thousands of circuit simulations, however the higher the sigma the more… Read More
IC Layout Tools from Japan at DAC
Last Monday I met with Nobuto Ono, VP Business development at Jedat (Japan EDA Technologies) while attending the DAC conference.
The company started in Tokyo and is Ex Seiko Instruments, in 2004.
Main product – layout editor for IC (SX 9000). New system is ALpha SX in 2002. 2007 listed on JASDAQ market. Like Virtuoso tools,… Read More
TSMC Theater Presentation: Atrenta SpyGlass!
Atrenta presented an update on the TSMC Soft IP Alliance Program at TSMC’s theater each day at DAC. Mike Gianfagna, Atrenta VP of Marketing, presented an introduction to SpyGlass, an overview of the program and a progress report. Dan Kochpatcharin, TSMC Deputy Director of IP Portfolio, was also there. Between Mike, Dan, and I there… Read More
RISC-V Virtualization and the Complexity of MMUs