Silvaco was founded the same year I entered the EDA industry (1984) fresh from University. I first met them at the Design Automation Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and have been an active observer of their growth ever since. In fact, Silvaco is now the largest privately held EDA company and is growing at a rapid pace. In 2014… Read More
Where Circuit Simulation Model Files Come From
I started out my engineering career by doing transistor-level circuit design and we used a proprietary SPICE circuit simulator. One thing that I quickly realized was that the accuracy of my circuit simulations depended entirely on the model files and parasitics. Here we are 40 years later and the accuracy of SPICE circuit simulations… Read More
The Latest in Parasitic Netlist Reduction and Visualization
The user group events held by EDA companies offer a unique opportunity to hear from designers and CAD engineers who are actually using the EDA tools “in the trenches”. Some user presentations are pretty straightforward – e.g., providing a quality-of-results (QoR) design comparison when invoking a new tool feature added to a recent… Read More
Advanced Materials and New Architectures for AI Applications
Over the past 50 years in our industry, there have been three invariant principles:
- Moore’s Law drives the pace of Si technology scaling
- system memory utilizes MOS devices (for SRAM and DRAM)
- computation relies upon the “von Neumann” architecture
Technology Behind the Chip
Tom Dillinger and I attended the Silvaco SURGE 2018 event in Silicon Valley last week with several hundred of our semiconductor brethren. Tom has a couple blogs ready to go but first let’s talk about the keynote by Silvaco CEO David Dutton. David isn’t your average EDA CEO, he spent the first 8 years of his career at Intel then spent … Read More
SURGE 2018 Silvaco Update!
The semiconductor industry has been very good to me over the past 35 years. I have had a front row seat to some of the most innovative and disruptive things like the fabless transformation and of course the Electronic Design Automation phenomenon, not to mention the end products that we as an industry have enabled. It is truly amazing… Read More
When it Comes to Process Migration, “Standard Cells” are Anything But
Standard cell library developers are faced with a daunting task when it is time to create a library for a new process node. Porting an existing library can be a big help, but even then, manual modifications to 800 or more cells is still required. Each of those cells has many geometric elements are that affected by new design rules. All… Read More
SPICE Model Generation by Machine Learning
It was 1988 when I got into SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis)while I was characterizing a 1.5 μm Standard cell library developed by students at my Alma-Mata Furtwangen University in Germany. My professor Dr. Nielinger was not only my advisor he also wrote the first SPICE bible in German language.… Read More
Sometimes a Solver is a Suitable Solution
Traditional, rule based, RC extractors rely on a substantial base of assumptions, which are increasingly proving unreliable. Having accurate RC extraction results for parasitic R’s and C’s is extremely important for ensuring proper circuit operation and for optimizing performance and power. Advanced process nodes are making… Read More
Free Webinar: Silvaco 3D Solver Based Extraction for Device and Circuit Designers
Designers spend a lot of time looking at their layouts in 2D. This is done naturally because viewing in 2D is faster and simpler than in 3D. It helps that humans are good at extrapolating from 2D to 3D. Analysis software, such as extraction software also spend a lot of time looking at layouts in 2D. While this is fine for approximate results,… Read More