In my last corporate EDA job I had customers in Korea that were evaluating a new circuit simulator and getting strange results. When I asked, “Could you send me your test case?” the reply was always, “No, we cannot let any of our IC design data leave the building because of security concerns.”… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
View from the top: Joe Sawicki
Joe Sawicki is the VP and General Manager at Mentor Graphics for the Design-to-Silicon Division where the Calibre product line is developed. We met today in Wilsonville, Oregon to review the challenges in IC design, processing and manufacturing.… Read More
What Will 2012 Bring The Semiconductor Ecosystem?
During my annual holiday meal with one of my favorite EDA icons some rather bold predictions were made. On his side it was more of what he would LIKE to see happen, on my side it was more of what will HAVE to happen for the semiconductor ecosystem to thrive in the coming years.
Mike Gianfagna (Viva Italia!) spent 15+ years with RCA/GE Semiconductor… Read More
Clock Design for SOCs with Lower Power and Better Specs
Dan Ganousis posted in our SemiWiki forums about a newer technique to lower the power consumed by GHz clocks on SOC designs and asked if I was interested to learn more, so we met today via WebEx. Dan is with a company called Cyclos Semiconductor, co-founded in 2006 by Marios Papaefthymiou, President and Alexander Ishii, VP of Engineering.… Read More
MEMS layout and automation
At a webinar today I listened and learned about how a tool called L-Edit can be used to layout MEMS designs plus automate the task to be more productive. I can see how the history of IC layout editing is now being repeated with MEMS because in the earliest IC layout tools we could only do manual entry of polygons, then gradually we got cells… Read More
iLVS: Improving LVS Usability at Advanced Nodes
LVS Challenges at Advanced Nodes
Accurate, comprehensive device recognition, connectivity extraction, netlist generation and, ultimately, circuit comparison becomes more complex with each new process generation. As the number of layers and layer derivations increases the complexity of devices, especially Layout Dependent… Read More
Learning About MEMS
My automobile has an air bag system that uses a MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical System) sensor to tell it when to deploy, and I’ve read headlines talking about MEMS over the years so I decided it was about time to learn more by attending a Webinar on Wednesday, December 14th at 8AM Pacific Time.
The EDA company hosting the Webinar… Read More
View from the top: Ajoy Bose
I sat down yesterday with Dr. Ajoy Bose, CEO of Atrenta, to get his view of the future of EDA – looking through a high-power “spyglass” of sorts. I first met Ajoy when he was at Software & Technologies. I was then the VP of Engineering for Compass Design Automation and we were considering off-shoring some development. We eventually… Read More
Synopsys Eats Magma: What Really Happened with Winners and Losers!
Conspiracy theories abound! The inside story of the Synopsys (SNPS) acquisition of Magma (LAVA) brings us back to the 1990’s tech boom with shady investment bankers and pump/dump schemes. After scanning my memory banks and digging around Silicon Valley for skeletons with a backhoe here is what I found out:
The Commission… Read More
Atrenta’s users. Survey says….
Atrenta did an online survey of their users. Of course Atrenta’s users are not necessarily completely representative of the whole marketplace so it is unclear how the results would generalize for the bigger picture, your mileage may vary. About half the people were design engineers, a quarter CAD engineers and the rest … Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot