Monday at DAC this year started off on a very optimistic note as Joe Sawicki from Siemens EDA presented in the Pavilion on the topic of Digitalization, a frequent theme in the popular press because of the whole Work From Home transition that we’ve gone through during the pandemic. Several industries are benefiting from the… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
A Practical Approach to Better Thermal Analysis for Chip and Package
Thermal modeling has become a hot topic for designers of today’s high-speed circuits and complex packages. This has led to the adoption of better and more sophisticated thermal modeling tools and flows as exemplified in this presentation by Micron at the IDEAS Digital Forum. The presentation is titled “Thermal Aware Memory Controller… Read More
Ansys CEO Ajei Gopal’s Keynote on 3D-IC at Samsung SAFE Forum
System on chip (SoC) based design has long been recognized as a powerful method to offer product differentiation through higher performance and expanded functionality. Yet, it comes with a number of limitations, such as high cost of development. Also, SoCs are monolithic, which can inhibit rapid adaptation in the face of changing… Read More
Effectively Managing Large IP Portfolios For Complex SoC Projects
In today’s world, no IC design is completed without instantiating a few or many pre-verified or already proven intellectual property (IP) blocks. With break-neck pace at which chip designs are advancing, many IP blocks may even be entire chip designs from earlier product releases. Third-party IP market has been growing at a healthy… Read More
Live 58th Design Automation Conference Coverage!
My beautiful first mate and I will be together at DAC this year. Her first DAC was 1985 in Las Vegas and we lived happily ever after. SemiWiki bloggers Tom Dillinger and Daniel Payne will also be at DAC attending sessions and meeting with exhibiting companies to learn and blog about the latest innovations inside the semiconductor … Read More
A Next-Generation Prototyping System for ASIC and Pre-Silicon Software Development
Every now and then, disruptive technology is brought to market, challenging the way things have been done to that point. We are all familiar with many such technologies. The rhetorical question is, how many of us were aware, recognized and acknowledged those technologies before they became well established? For example, a startup… Read More
Continuous Integration of RISC-V Testbenches
In my last blog post about AMIQ EDA, I talked with CEO and co-founder Cristian Amitroaie about their support for continuous integration (CI). We discussed in some detail how their Design and Verification Tools (DVT) Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Verissimo SystemVerilog Linter are used in CI flows. Cristian… Read More
Ansys to Present Multiphysics Cloud Enablement with Microsoft Azure at DAC
Ansys and Microsoft collaborated extensively over the past year to optimize and test Ansys’ signoff multiphysics simulation tools on the Azure cloud. Microsoft has invited Ansys to present the joint results in Azure’s DAC booth theater in San Francisco this year.
Two presentations are planned: covering the enablement of Ansys… Read More
Creative Applications of Formal at Intel
One of the sessions I enjoyed at the Synopsys Verification Day 2021 was a presentation on applying formal to a couple of non-traditional problem domains. I like talks of this kind because formal can sometimes be boxed into a limited set of applications, under-exploiting the potential of the technology. Intel have built a centralized… Read More
System Technology Co-Optimization (STCO)
My first exposure to seeing multiple die inside of a single package in order to get greater storage was way back in 1978 at Intel, when they combined two 4K bit DRAM die in one package, creating an 8K DRAM chip, called the 2109. Even Apple used two 16K bit DRAM chips from Mostek to form a 32K bit DRAM, included in the Apple III computer, circa… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside