Getting your tape-out done on time is hard, but can it be made easier? That was the main topic of Mentor’s Calibre Panel held at DAC 2018, attended by a few key players in IC design ecosystem: Bob Stear, VP of Marketing at Samsung represented the foundry side; from the IP side, Prasad Subramaniam, VP of eSilicon for R&D and Technology;… Read More
Design for Power: An Insider View
The second keynote at Mentor’s U2U this year was given by Hooman Moshar, VP of Engineering at Broadcom, on the always (these days) important topic of design for power. This is one of my favorite areas. I have, I think, a decent theoretical background in the topic, but I definitely need a periodic refresh on the ground reality from the… Read More
Mentor at the 55th Design Automation Conference
It’s hard to believe that this is the 55th DAC and even harder to believe that this will be my 35th. So much has changed in 35 years, with DAC back in San Francisco I expect a VERY big crowd and even bigger announcements, absolutely.
Not only is this an epic time for semiconductors, I would say that EDA is exciting again and the Mentor… Read More
Achieving Clean Design Early with Calibre-RTD
Functional and physical verification are easily the two long poles in most IC product developments. During a design implementation cycle, design teams tend to push physical verification (PV) step towards the end as it is a time consuming process and requires significant manual interventions.
PV Challenges
In the traditional… Read More
Foundry Partnership Simplifies Design for Reliability
This builds on a couple of topics I have covered for quite a while from an analysis point of view – integrity and reliability. The power distribution network and some other networks like clock trees are particularly susceptible to both IR-drop and electromigration (EM) problems. The first can lead to intermittent timing failures,… Read More
Mentor Emulation Platform Now available on Amazon Web Services
Emulation is a hotly contested EDA market segment (which is being won by Mentor) and EDA in the Cloud is a trending topic so putting the two together is a very big deal, absolutely.
The following is a quick email Q&A with Jean-Marie Brunet, Director of Marketing, Emulation Division, Mentor, a Siemens Business. If you have other… Read More
Mentor Siemens Update 2018
As you know I am a big fan of disruption and the Siemens acquisition of Mentor is turning out to be one of my favorite EDA disruptions. At first it was a little bit perplexing but after one short year it makes complete sense.
Siemens is acquiring Mentor as part of its Vision 2020 concept to be the Benchmark for the New Industrial Age. It’s… Read More
Should EDA Follow a Foundry Model?
There is an interesting discussion in the SemiWiki forum about EDA and the foundry business model which got me to thinking about the next disruptive move for the semiconductor industry. First let’s look at some of the other disruptive EDA events that I experienced firsthand throughout my 30+ year career.
When I started in 1984 EDA… Read More
Semiconductor, EDA Industries Maturing? Wally Disagrees
Wally Rhines (President and CEO of Mentor, A Siemens Business) has been pushing a contrarian view versus the conventional wisdom that the semiconductor business, and by extension EDA, is slowing down. He pitched this at DVCon and more recently at U2U where I got to hear the pitch and talk to him afterwards.
What causes maturing is… Read More
Semiconductor Specialization Drives New Industry Structure
When traveling the world there are the things that you see and the people that you meet. I have been very fortunate to meet some of the most amazing people and one of those people is Dr. Walden Rhines. Wally spent the first half of his career in semiconductors at TI and the second half in EDA with Mentor Graphics which gives him a cyborg … Read More