At advanced nodes, design rules are necessarily more complex and restrictive. Although most of the time you can find a way to live with them, sometimes it’s necessary to seek a waiver from the foundry for a particular design feature. This involves documenting the feature, the design rules in question and the conditions under which… Read More
How to Simplify Complexities in Power Verification?
With multiple functionalities added into a single chip, be it a SoC or an ASIC, maintaining low power consumption has become critical for any design. Various techniques at the technology as well as design level are employed to accomplish the low power target. These include thinner oxides in transistors, different sections of … Read More
Assertions verifying blocks to systems at Broadcom
Speaking from experience, it is very difficult to get an OEM customer to talk about how they actually use standards and vendor products. A new white paper co-authored by Broadcom lends insight into how a variety of technologies combine in a flow from IP block simulation verification with assertions to complete SoC emulation with… Read More
Mentor Graphics Continues To Perform Well
The EDA tool space has been booming in this new “mobile era” of computing. As the world transitions to system-on-chip design methodologies, and as more teams are developing even more products for an ever-broadening set of end markets, the demand for ever more sophisticated design tools has only continued to skyrocket.… Read More
Develop A Complete System Prototype Using Vista VP
Yes, it means complete hardware and software integration, debugging, verification, optimization of performance and power and all other operational aspects of an electronic system in semiconductor design. In modern SoCs, several IPs, RTL blocks, software modules, firmware and so on sit together on a single chip, hence making… Read More
What’s in your network processor?
Recently, one of those very restrained press releases – in this case, Mentor Graphics and Imagination Technologiesextending their partnership for MIPS software support– crossed my desk with about 10% of the story. The 90% of this story I want to focus on is why Mentor is putting energy into this partnership… Read More
Mentor Teaches Us About the Higg’s Boson
Once a year Mentor has a customer appreciation event in Silicon Valley with a guest speaker on some aspect of science. This is silicon valley, after all, so we all have to be geeks. This year it was Dr Sean Carroll from CalTech on The Particle at the End of the Universe, the Hunt for The Higg’s Boson and What’s Next.
Wally … Read More
Real Time Concurrent Layout Editing – It’s Possible
Layout editing is a complex task, traditionally done manually by designers, and the layout design productivity largely depends on the designer’s skills and expertise. However, a good tool with features for ease of design is a must. Layout productivity has been an area of focus and various features are constantly being added in… Read More
It’s a 14nm photomask, what could possibly go wrong?
Let’s start with the bottom line: in 14nm processes, errors which have typically been little more than noise with respect to photomask critical dimension (CD) control targets at larger process nodes are about to become very significant, even out of control if not accounted for.… Read More
Test, The Forgotten Step-Child of Semiconductor Design
Somehow, when designing a chip it is synthesis and place & route that gets all the attention. But it is no good taping out perfect layout without also having away to test the silicon. Somehow, test just isn’t as glamorous.
On September 10-12th is the International Test Conference which, as usual, is at the Disneyland Hotel… Read More