EDAC has a series of seminars for emerging companies with Jim Hogan. Jim has been in EDA since, like, forever. First at National, then at Cadence, then at Artisan (now ARM) and then as an investor first at Telos (Cadence’s VC arm) and more recently on his own at Vista Ventures. He has been involved with many EDA and semiconductor… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Going with the Flow at AMD
At EDPS in Monterey, Tom Spyrou of AMD talked about their compute environment in the context of parallel algorithms. I discovered that they are a big user of RTDA’s FlowTracer so I talked to Philip Steinke at AMD about how they used it.
He said that they largely use it as described in The Art of Flows as a graphical distributed … Read More
Aldec and Tanner EDA at DAC
In April I blogged about a webinar on co-simulation hosted by Aldec and Tanner EDA where they showed how the RTL simulator (Riviera PRO) and SPICE simulator (T-Spice) had been connected together for IC designers wanting to do real AMS simulations.
The availability date of the co-simulation wasn’t clear, so today the press… Read More
CDN Live in Munich: Cadence is back on track!
Before going to Munich to attend to CDN-Live, I took a look at the agenda to figure out which presentations to attend, and I must say it was not so easy to choose: CDN Live agendais dense, with multiple tracks running in parallel (Custom Design, Digital Implementations, Design IP, Functional Verifications and Verification IP, PCB… Read More
Semiconductor Ecosystem Keynotes: ARM 2012
Yesterday’s SEMICO IP Ecosystem Conference was well worth the time. Everybody was there: ARM, Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, GlobalFoundries, TSMC, MIPS, Tensilica, AMD, Atrenta, Sonics, and Tabula, everybody except Intel of course. What do Intel and I have in common? We don’t play well with others…
First up was… Read More
Analyzing Cortex Performance
CPAK sounds like something politicians create to collect money, but in fact it is a Carbon Performance Analysis Kit. It consists of models, reference platform, initialization software (for bare metal CPAKs) or OS binary (for Linux and Android based CPAKs). They are (or will soon be) available for ARM Cortex A9, ARM Cortex A15 and… Read More
View from the top: Michael Buehler-Garcia
Yesterday I met with Michael Buehler-Garcia, Director of Marketing at Mentor Graphics for Calibre in Wilsonville, Oregon to get an update on what’s coming up at DAC, the premier conference and trade show for our industry.
Cadence Update 2012!
What’s new at Cadence? Quite a bit actually. I have always been a Cadence fan, I mean really, they gave birth to modern EDA. Unfortunately, Cadence really lost me during the Avant! legal action, the Mike Fister years, and EDA360. Recently, however, Cadence has made some big changes that will definitely get them back on my good side.… Read More
DAC: Finding Somewhere to Eat
I am not going to attempt to give you any restaurant advice beyond what I’ve already done by listing the good places near the conference center. San Francisco reputedly has over 3000 restaurants so I don’t know anything about more than a tiny fraction. However, with that many restaurants, most places are pretty good. If not, they … Read More
Intel Foundry All Hat No Cattle?
If you look real close at the #49 DAC floor plan you will see the tiny Intel booth dwarfed by those of TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and ARM. The number one semiconductor company in the world does not have the budget for the cornerstone conference of the semiconductor ecosystem? Oh my…… Intel has a big foundry hat and no cattle… Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification