My IC design career started out with manually sizing transistors to improve performance, while minimizing layout area and power consumption. Fortunately we don’t have to do manual transistor sizing anymore, thanks to EDA tools that are quicker and more accurate than manual methods. MunEDA is an EDA vendor that has developed… Read More
I first got involved with layout generators back in 1982 while at Intel, and about 10% of a GPU was automatically generated using some code that I wrote. It was an easy task for one engineer to complete, because the circuits were digital, and no optimization was required. In an IEEE paper from the 2022 18th International Conference… Read More
Advanced semiconductor nanometer technology nodes, together with smart IC design applications enable today very complex and powerful systems for communication, automotive, data transmission, AI, IoT, medical, industry, energy harvesting, and many more.
However, more aggressive time-to-market and higher performance… Read More
My career started out by designing DRAM circuits at Intel, and we manually sized every transistor in the entire design to get the optimum performance, power and area. Yes, it was time consuming, required lots of SPICE iterations and was a bit error prone. Thank goodness times have changed, and circuit designers can work smarter … Read More
There have always been good reasons to port designs to new foundries or processes. These reasons have included reusing IP in new projects, moving an entire design to a smaller node to improve PPA, or second sourcing manufacturing. While there can be many potential business motivations for any of the above, in today’s environment… Read More
By any measure analog circuit design is a difficult and complex process. This point is driven home in a recent webinar by MunEDA. Michael Pronath, VP Products and Solutions at MunEDA, lays out why, even with the assistance of simulators, analog circuit sizing and tuning can consume weeks of time in what can potentially be a non-convergent… Read More
It has been my pleasure to interview Harald Neubauer, CEO of MunEDA. A veteran of the EDA industry, Harald cofounded MunEDA in 2001.
What brought you to the EDA industry?
Well, I always wanted to found a tech startup and was developing and evaluating various business ideas together with my later cofounder Andreas. Soon after we got… Read More
There is an old saying popularized by Mark Twain that goes “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It turns out that no one can say who originated this saying, yet despite however you might feel about statistics, they play an important role in verifying analog designs. The truth is that there are large numbers… Read More
The commonly advanced reason for IP reuse is lower cost and shorter development time. However, IP reuse presents its own challenges, especially for analog designs. In the case of digital designs, once a new standard cell library is available, it is usually not too hard to resynthesize RTL to create new working silicon. For analog… Read More
Every year at DAC, in addition to the hubbub of the exhibit floor and the relatively short technical sessions, there are a number of tutorials that dive in depth into interesting topics. At the 56th DAC in Las Vegas this year, MunEDA offered an interesting tutorial on Analog IP migration and optimization. This is a key issue for large… Read More
