Most people think that designing successful high speed analog circuits requires a mixture of magic, skill and lots of hard work. While this might be true, in reality it also requires a large dose of collaboration among each of the members of the design, tool and fabrication panoply. This point was recently made abundantly clear … Read More
Understanding Sources of Clock Jitter Critical for SOC’s
Jitter issues in SOC’s reside at the crossroads of analog and digital design. Digital designers would prefer to live in a world of clocks that are free from jitter effects. At the same time, analog designers can build PLL’s that are precise and finely tuned. However, when a perfectly working PLL is inserted into an SOC, things can … Read More
Who knew designing PLL’s was so complicated?
Well it comes as no surprise to those that use and design them, that PLL’s are a world unto themselves and very complicated indeed. With PLL’s we are talking about analog designs that rely on ring oscillators or LC tanks. They are needed on legacy nodes, like the ones that IoT chips are based on, and they are crucial for high speed advanced… Read More
CTO Interview: Jeff Galloway of Silicon Creations
It is clear that IP companies play an important role in modern semiconductor design, in fact, I would say that they are imperative. Founded in 2006, Silicon Creations is one of those imperative IP companies that provide silicon proven IP to customers big and small around the world. To follow-up on our conversation with Silicon Creations… Read More
CEO Interview: Randy Caplan of Silicon Creations
For the next installment in our series of semiconductor CEO interviews we meet with Randy Caplan from Silicon Creations. Randy has helped build the company from a small startup to one of the world’s leading providers of interface and clocking IP. Almost every new chip developed these days has a requirement for PLLs and SerDes. Since… Read More