Introduction
Monday morning at DAC I attended the breakfast presentation from Magma, ARM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The 28nm node is ready for business using Magma tools and ARM libraries.
During breakfast I met Karim Arabi, Ph.D. from QualComm. He’s a senior director of engineering in San Diego and wanted to learn more about… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm Design Ecosystem!
GLOBALFOUNDRIES will show off its 28nm design ecosystem at #48DAC next week in San Diego. The company will feature a full design ecosystem for its 28nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) technology, including silicon-validated flows, process design kits (PDKs), design-for-manufacturing (DFM), and intellectual property (IP) in partnership… Read More
Sagantec 2 Migrate iPad2s @ #48DAC
Sagantec is the leading EDA provider of process migration solutions for custom IC design. Sagantec’s EDA solutions enable IC designers to leverage their investment in existing physical design IP and accomplish dramatic time and effort savings in the implementation of custom, analog, mixed-signal and memory circuits… Read More
New TSMC 28nm Design Ecosystem!
TSMC rolled out the new reference flows for 28nm design as part of the Open Innovation Platform. The biggest surprise (to me) is that Cadence is STILL in the TSMC reference flows!
The updated TSMC OIP wiki is here, the Reference Flow 12.0 wiki can be found here, the AMS 2.0 reference flow wiki is here, and the official TSMC PR is here. … Read More
3D IC @ #48DAC
A three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC ) is a chip in which two or more layers of active electronic components are integrated both vertically and horizontally into a single circuit. The semiconductor industry is hotly pursuing this emerging technology in many different forms, as a result the full definition is still somewhat… Read More
48th Annual Design Automation Conference
The 48[SUP]th[/SUP] Design Automation Conference (DAC) is now upon us. DAC is billed as “the premier event for the design of electronic circuits and systems, and for EDA and silicon solutions” for which I would have to agree with 100%.
The first DAC I attended was in 1984, Albuquerque New Mexico, which was one of the first to allow … Read More
Analyzing and Planning Electro-static Discharge (ESD) Protection
ESD has historically been a big problem analyzed with ad-hoc approaches. As explained earlier, this is no longer an adequate way to plan nor signoff ESD protection.
Pathfinder is the first full-chip comprehensive ESD planning and verification solution. It is targeted to address limitations in today’s methodologies.… Read More
Cadence Virtuoso 6.1.5 and ClioSoft Hardware Configuration Management – Webinar Review
Introduction
Cadence and ClioSoft made a webinar recently and I’ll summarize what I learned from it.
What’s New from Cadence in Virtuoso 6.1.5
- Back2Basics (28nm rule integration, Skill improved with object-oriented, OASIS support, HTML Publisher, Waveform re-written for better Analog support, smaller Waveform
A New Hierarchical 3D Field Solver
Introduction
3D field solvers produce the most accurate netlists of RC values of your IC layout that can then be used in SPICE circuit simulators however most of these solvers produce a flat netlist which tends to simulate rather slowly. Thankfully several years ago the first hierarchical SPICE tools were offered by Nassda (HSIM… Read More
Electro-static Discharge (ESD)
Electro-static discharge (ESD) has been a problem since the beginning of IC production. Chips function on power supplies of up to a few volts (depending on the era) whereas ESD voltages are measured in the thousands of volts. When you reach out for your car door handle and a spark jumps across, that is ESD. If you were touching a chip… Read More
Has ASML Reached the Great Wall of China