When it comes to electronic design automation (EDA), there are two aspects to this technologically challenging and highly competitive field. First, there is the task of designing very complex chips for which a full suite of various software tools are needed. Then there is the task of managing extremely complex EDA workflows and… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
The Increasing Gaps in PLM Systems with Handling Electronics
Product LifeCycle Management (PLM) systems have shown incredible value for integrating the enterprise with a single view of the product design, deployment, maintenance, and end-of-life processes. PLM systems have traditionally grown from the mechanical design space, and this still forms their strength.
Meanwhile, due… Read More
DFT Moves up to 2.5D and 3D IC
The annual ITC event was held the last week of September, and I kept reading all of the news highlights from the EDA vendors, as the time spent on the tester can be a major cost and the value to catching defective chips from reaching production is so critical. Chiplets, 2.5D and 3D IC design have caught the attention of the test world, … Read More
Siemens EDA Discuss Permanent and Transient Faults
This is a topic worth coverage for those of us who aim to know more about safety. There are devils in the details on how ISO 26262 quantifies fault metrics, where I consider my understanding probably similar to other non-experts: light. All in all, a nice summary of the topic.
Permanent and transient faults 101
The authors kick off … Read More
Analyzing Clocks at 7nm and Smaller Nodes
In the good old days the clock signal looked like a square wave , and had a voltage swing of 5 volts, however with 7nm technology the clock signals can now look more like a sawtooth signal and may not actually reach the full Vdd value of 0.65V inside the core of a chip. I’ll cover some of the semiconductor market trends, and then challenges… Read More
Webinar: Post-layout Circuit Sizing Optimization
My IC design career started out with manually sizing transistors to improve performance, while minimizing layout area and power consumption. Fortunately we don’t have to do manual transistor sizing anymore, thanks to EDA tools that are quicker and more accurate than manual methods. MunEDA is an EDA vendor that has developed… Read More
Test Ordering for Agile. Innovation in Verification
Can we order regression tests for continuous integration (CI) flows, minimizing time between code commits and feedback on failures? Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas.… Read More
Whatever Happened to the Big 5G Airport Controversy? Plus A Look To The Future
In December 2021, just weeks before Verizon and AT&T were set to enable their new radio access networks in the 5G mid-band spectrum (also known as C-Band), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin (SAIB) and a statement notifying operators of potential 5G interference… Read More
WEBINAR: How to Accelerate Ansys RedHawk-SC in the Cloud
As we all know, growing complexity of IC designs and the resulting numbers of EDA tools and design steps lead to very intricate workflows which require compute cycles that outstrip current compute capacity of most IC enterprises. The obvious question is how to efficiently leverage near infinite compute capacity in the … Read More
3D IC – Managing the System-level Netlist
I just did a Google search for “3D IC”, and was stunned to see it return a whopping 476,000 results. This topic is trending, because more companies are using advanced IC packaging to meet their requirements, and yet the engineers doing the 3D IC design have new challenges to overcome. One of those challenges is creating… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki