Because IC design and verification never gets simpler, verification engineers now have to comply with voltage-dependent DRC (VD-DRC) rules. What does this term mean, and what new challenges does it bring to the DRC task? I’d like to share what I learned during another water-cooler conversation with Dina Medhat, senior technical… Read More
Will those IO pad rings pass foundry muster?
I was talking recently to Dina Medhat, a senior technical marketing engineer at Mentor, about, of all things, IO rings. It has not occurred to me that verifying that your IO rings comply with foundry rules presents new challenges.
IO ring checking isn’t new, nor is it unique to advanced IC process nodes. However, the same forces of… Read More
Getting the Best Dynamic Power Analysis Numbers
On your last SoC project how well did your dynamic power estimates match up with silicon results, especially while running real applications on your electronic product? If your answer was, “Well, not too good”, then keep reading this blog. A classical approach to dynamic power analysis is to run your functional testbench… Read More
How to design silicon photonics–take this class!
Silicon Photonics is the hottest prospect for blazing fast communication between chips in servers, data centers, and supercomputers.
By using light instead of electrical signals, it promise to usher in a new standard of high performance, low power devices while extending the use of more mature process nodes, helping to reduce… Read More
Experts Talk at Mentor Booth
It’s less than four weeks to go at DAC 2015 and the program is final now. So I started investigating new technologies, trends, methodologies, and tools that will be unveiled and discussed in this DAC. In the hindsight of the semiconductor industry over the last year, I see 14nm technologies in the realization stage and 10nm beckoning… Read More
Calibre xACT Shakes Up 16nm and Below Extraction Game
Mentor Graphics made a big announcement regarding SOC extraction at their User2User conference in San Jose during April. Before I get to the meat of the announcement, I’d like to reflect back on the early days of Calibre-DRC at Mentor. I was in Sales at Mentor around 1999, and Calibre-DRC was the new kid on the block. We had to go convince… Read More
Ask me about Mentor at DAC!
If you’ve been following DAC general chair Anne Cirkel’s weekly blog, you know the conference program is now final. There’s much to suggest it will be a great DAC, including a record number of submissions in several content categories and a compelling lineup of keynoters. The week will start with an update on Google’s smart contact… Read More
Can You Really Automate Analog IC Layout?
Digital IC design has been largely automated with high-level languages, RTL coding, logic synthesis, and automated place and route tools. What about analog IC layout automation, is it possible? A few EDA companies think that it is possible and even practical. In recent memory there were two companies really focused on analog … Read More
Are There Trojans in Your Silicon? You Don’t Know
Yesterday was the Mentor users’ group U2U. As usual, Wally Rhines gave the keynote, this year entitled Secure Silicon, Enabler for the Internet of Things. Wally started off saying it was a challenge to find a new angle. The number of news articles on cloud computing has exploded from nothing to 72,000 last year. On IoT from … Read More
TSV Modeling Key for Next Generation SOC Module Performance
The use of silicon interposers is growing. Several years ago Xilinx broke new ground by employing interposers in their Virtex®-7 H580T FPGA. Last August Samsung announced what they say is the first DDR4 module to use 3D TSV’s for enterprise servers. Their 64GB double data rate-4 modules will be used for high end computing where … Read More