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Almost every week I read about a slowing world economy, yet in EDA we have some bright spots to talk about, like Tanner EDA finishing its 24th year with an 8% increase in revenue. More details are in the press release from today.
I spoke with Greg Lebsack, President of Tanner EDA on Monday to ask about how they are growing. Greg has been… Read More
In working with TSMC and GlobalFoundries on AMS design reference flows I have experienced first hand the increasing verification challenges of nanometer analog, RF, and mixed-signal circuits. Tools in this area have to be both silicon accurate and blindingly fast! Berkeley Design Automation is one of the key vendors in this … Read More
The acquisitions of Virage Logic by Synopsys in 2010, have allowed building a stronger, diversified IP port-folio, including the embedded SRAM, embedded non-volatile memory and embedded test and repair solution. Looking back in time, I remember the end of the 80’s: at that time the up-to-date solution to embed SRAM in your ASIC… Read More
There are various rumors around about Cadence starting to close up stuff that has been open for a long time. Way back in the midst of time, as part of the acquisition of CCT, the Federal Trade Commission forced Cadence to open up LEF/DEF and allow interoperability of Cadence tools (actually only place and route) I believe for 10 years.… Read More
Going up! Power and performance issues, along with manufacturing yield issues, limit how much bigger chips can get in two dimensions. That, and the fact that you can’t manufacture two different processes on the same wafer, mean that we are going up into the third dimension.
The simplest way is what is called package-in-package… Read More
Last week GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Mentor Graphics presented at the Tech Design Forum on how they collaborated on a third generation DFM flow. When I reviewed the slides of the presentation it really struck me on how the old thinking in DRC (Design Rule Checking) of Pass/Fail for layout rules had been replaced with a score represented… Read More
Even if nSys acquisition by Synopsys will not have a major impact on Synopsys’ balance sheet, it is a kind of earthquake in the Verification market landscape. After the Denali acquisition by Cadence in 2010, nSys was most probably the market leader in verification IP, if we look at the independent VIP providers (excluding Cadence).… Read More
The CEO panel at the 2nd GTC wasn’t especially enlightening. The theme was that going forward will require cooperation for success and everyone was really ready to cooperate.
The most interesting concept was Aart talking about moving from what he called “scale complexity” aka Moore’s law to what he … Read More
Verifying circuits on advanced process nodes has always been difficult, and it’s no easier with today’s nanometer CMOS processes. There’s a great paradox in nanometer circuit design and verification. Designers achieve their greatest differentiation when they implement analog, mixed-signal, RF and custom … Read More
Whether you use a gate-first or gate-last High-k Metal Gate implementation, yield will be your #1 concern at 28nm, which makes variation analysis and verification a big challenge. One of the consulting projects I have been working on with the foundries and top fabless semiconductor companies is High-Sigma Monte Carlo (HSMC) … Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot