As digital transmission speeds increase, designers use various techniques to improve the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver output. One such technique is the Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE) scheme, commonly used in high-speed Serializer-Deserializer (SerDes) circuits to mitigate the effects of channel noise and … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
AI Assists PCB Designers
Generative AI is all the rage with systems like ChatGPT, Google Bard and DALL-E being introduced with great fanfare in the past year. The EDA industry has also been keen to adopt the trends of using AI techniques to assist IC engineers across many disciplines. Saugat Sen, Product Marketing at Cadence did a video call with me to explain… Read More
Multi-Die Systems: The Biggest Disruption in Computing for Years
At the recent Synopsys Users Group Meeting (SNUG) I had the honor of leading a panel of experts on the topic of chiplets. The discussion was based on a report published by the MIT Technology Review Insights in cooperation with Synopsys. This is a very comprehensive report (12 pages) that is available online HERE.
Here is the preface… Read More
Hardware Root of Trust for Automotive Safety
Traveling by car is something that I take for granted and I just expect that my trips will be safe, yet our cars are increasingly using dozens of ECUs, SoCs and millions of lines of software code that combined together present a target for hackers or system failures. The Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL) are known by the letters:… Read More
Siemens EDA on Managing Verification Complexity
Harry Foster is Chief Scientist in Verification at Siemens EDA and has held roles in the DAC Executive Committee over multiple years. He gave a lunchtime talk at DVCon on the verification complexity topic. He is an accomplished speaker and always has a lot of interesting data to share, especially his takeaways from the Wilson Research… Read More
Taking the Risk out of Developing Your Own RISC-V Processor with Fast, Architecture-Driven, PPA Optimization
Are you developing or thinking about developing your own RISC-V processor? You’re not alone. The use of the RISC-V ISA to develop processors for SoCs is a growing trend. RISC-V offers a lot of flexibility with the ability to customize or create ISA and microarchitectural extensions to differentiate your design no matter your application… Read More
Optimizing Return on Investment (ROI) of Emulator Resources
Modern day chips are increasingly complex with stringent quality requirements, very demanding performance requirement and very low power consumption requirement. Verification of these chips is very time consuming and accounts for approximately 70% of the simulation workload on EDA server farms. As software-based simulators… Read More
WEBINAR: Design Cost Reduction – How to track and predict server resources for complex chip design project?
During the design of complex chips, cost reduction is becoming a real challenge for small, medium and large companies. Resource management is a key to contain design cost.
The chip design market is expecting automated solutions to help in the resource prediction, planning and analysis. AI-based technologies are promising … Read More
Multiphysics Analysis from Chip to System
Multiphysics simulation is the process of computational methods to model and analyze a system to understand its response to different physical interactions like heat transfer, electromagnetic fields, and mechanical structures. Using this technique, designers can generate physics-based models and analyze the behavior… Read More
Feeding the Growing Hunger for Bandwidth with High-Speed Ethernet
The increasing demands for massive amounts of data are driving high-performance computing (HPC) to advance the pace in the High-speed Ethernet world. This in turn, is increasing the levels of complexity when designing networking SoCs like switches, retimers, and pluggable modules. This growth is accelerating the need for … Read More


Intel and TSMC Take Different Paths to High-NA EUV