In the last few decades, electronics has become more and more central to our lives. When I was a child the only electronics in the house was the radio and the television, both of which contained tubes. Two big things happened that upended that world: the invention of the transistor and the invention of the integrated circuit. A modern… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
CDNLive Call For Papers
The Silicon Valley CDNLive, the Cadence user conference, will be on March 12-13th 2013 in Santa Clara. But the heart of CDNLive are customer presentations and the call for papers is now open. The deadline is December 4th (at 5pm PST for people who really like to come down to the wire). At this point only an abstract is required.
There… Read More
The Auto Industry Speaks @ Renesas DevCon
This year’s Renesas DevCon in Orange County, CA kicked off yesterday with an impressive lineup of speakers, record attendance, and an increased focus on automotive.
“TheAuto Industry Speaks,” an Expert Panel organized by Martin Bakerof Renesas, featured:
- Yoichi Yano, RenesasExecutive VP and Member of the Board, who early
Power and Reliability Challenges
Last week I attended the Ansys/Apache seminars on “Dimensions of Electronic Design.” The two big challenges as we go down to 28nm and 20nm and below are keeping power manageable and keeping reliability up.
The big challenge with power is that we can put so much stuff on a die and clock it so fast that the power is exceeding… Read More
Learning about MEMS in Israel from: EDA companies, Foundry, University, Users
In April I attended and blogged about a webinar on MEMS and IC co-design hosted by two EDA companies: SoftMEMS and Tanner EDA. On October 30th you can attend a full-day event in Israel that is more comprehensive than the webinar that I attended.… Read More
Hybrids on BeO then, 3D-IC in silicon now
Once upon a time (since every good story begins that way), I worked on 10kg, 70 mm diameter things that leapt out of tubes and chased after airplanes and helicopters. The electronics for these things were fairly marvelous, in the days when surface mount technology was in its infancy and having reliability problems in some situations.… Read More
TSMC OIP Forum 2012 Trip Report!
The second annual TSMC Open Integration Platform Ecosystem Forum was last week and let me tell you it was excellent. Great update on the TSMC process technology road maps, great for networking within the fabless semiconductor ecosystem, great for seeing what’s new in EDA and IP, and great for SemiWiki. It was time well spent for … Read More
A Brief History of Aldec
Dr. Stanley Hyduke founded Aldecin 1984 and their first product was delivered in 1985, named SUSIE (Standard Universal Simulator for Improved Engineering), a gate-level, DOS-based simulator. The SUSIE simulator was priced lower than other EDA vendor tools from the big three: Daisy, Mentor and Valid (aka DMV). Aldec maintains… Read More
DAC: It’s the Last Week for Many Submissions
The deadline is coming up at the end of next week (technically on Monday October 29th for those of you who like real brinkmanship) for several aspects of DAC (not submission of papers for the conference itself) but most of the less academic-oriented things.
Proposals for:
- Special Sessions
- Tutorials
- Panel sessions (in the conference
Virtuoso Has Twins
Cadence has apparently announced that going forward the Virtuoso environment is going to be split into two and offered as two separate code-streams, the current IC6.x and a new IC12.x. The idea is to introduce a new product with features that were specifically developed for new technologies such as double patterning aware layout… Read More
Selling the Forges of the Future: U.S. Report Exposes China’s Reliance on Western Chip Tools