When talking about today’s sophisticated advanced node designs it’s easy to first think about the digital challenges. Yet, the effort to design the needed analog and mixed signal blocks for them should not be underestimated. The need for high speed clocks, high frequency RF circuits and high bit rate IOs makes the analog portions,… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Synopsys Tutorial on Dependable System Design
Synopsys hosted a tutorial on the last day of DVCon USA 2022 on design/system dependability. Which here they interpret as security, functional safety, and reliability analysis. The tutorial included talks from DARPA, AMD, Arm Research and Synopsys. DARPA and AMD talked about general directions and needs, Arm talked about their… Read More
Designing a FinFET Test Chip for Radiation Threats
Much of the technology that goes into aerospace applications is some of the most advanced technology that exists. However, these same systems must also offer the highest level of reliability in what is arguably an extremely difficult environment. For semiconductors a major environmental risk in aerospace applications are … Read More
Cadence and DesignCon – Workflows and SI/PI Analysis
DesignCon 2022 is back to a live conference, from Tuesday, April 5th through Thursday, April 7th, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
Introduction
DesignCon is a unique gathering in our industry. Its roots incorporated a focus on complex design and analysis requirements of (long-reach) high-speed interfaces. Technical… Read More
AMIQ EDA Adds Support for Visual Studio Code to DVT IDE Family
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a widely known adage across the world. Recognizing patterns and cycles becomes easier when data is presented pictorially. Naturally, data visualization technology has a long history from the early days, when people used a paper and pencil to graph data, to modern day visualization platforms.… Read More
Shift left gets a modulated signal makeover
Everyone saw Shift Left, the EDA blockbuster. Digital logic design, with perfect 1s and 0s simulated through perfect switches, shifted into a higher gear. But the dark arts – RF systems, power supplies, and high-speed digital – didn’t shift smoothly. What do these practitioners need in EDA to see more benefits from shift left? … Read More
Synopsys Announces FlexEDA for the Cloud!
There’s been a lot of discussion and hype regarding use of the cloud for chip design for quite a while, more than ten years I would say. I spoke with Synopsys to better understand their recent Synopsys Cloud announcement to determine if it is different. Briefly, it is different, and here is why:
If you’re trying to design a complex SoC,… Read More
Symbolic Trojan Detection. Innovation in Verification
We normally test only for correctness of the functionality we expect. How can we find functionality (e.g. Trojans) that we don’t expect? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always,… Read More
Path Based UPF Strategies Explained
The development of the Unified Power Format (UPF) was spurred on by the need for explicit ways to enable specification and verification of power management aspects of SoC designs. The origins of UPF date back to its first release in 2007. Prior to that several vendors had their own methods of specifying power management aspects … Read More
WEBINAR: Overcome Aging Issues in Clocks at Sub-10nm Designs
We all know that designers work hard to reach design closure on SOC designs. However, what gets less attention from consumers is the effort that goes into ensuring that these chips will be fully operational and meeting timing specs over their projected lifetime. Of course, this is less important for chips used in devices with projected… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing