One of the recurring themes I see here in the pages of SemiWiki and elsewhere is this pitched, bordering on religious battle between Altera and Xilinx. Just because both are FPGA technologies, the tendency is to put them in the same bucket, drawing direct comparisons between them. Some folks say there is no comparison; Xilinx has… Read More
How Well is HSPICE Tracking Current Design Trends?
For about 5 years now Synopsys has held an HSPICE SIG event in conjunction with DesignCon. It features a small vendor faire with companies that partner with Synopsys on HSPICE flows. They also have a dinner with industry/customer speakers and provide an update on HSPICE development. Lastly there is a Q&A where customers get… Read More
What’s New with Static Timing Analysis
When I hear the phrase Static Timing Analysis (STA) the first EDA tool that comes to mind is PrimeTimefrom Synopsys, and this type of tool is essential to reaching timing closure for digital designs by identifying paths that are limiting chip performance. Sunil Walia, PrimeTime ADV marketing lead spoke with me by phone on Thursday… Read More
NVM IP now Available for On-Chip MCU Code
As of today NVM IP has been mostly used in SoC or IC to support very specific needs like analog trimming and calibration or encryption key integration for Digital Right Management (DRM) purpose. In other words small size (less than 1K-bit) few times programmable (FTP) NVM IP was enough to support these needs, thus most of the NVM IP… Read More
How Imagination tested the PowerVR Series6XT
We have been hearing for some time about the Synopsys HAPS-70 and how they have co-created the hardware and software architecture for FPGA-based prototyping with their customers. Now, we see details published by Synopsys on how they collaborated with Imagination on the design of the PowerVR Series6XT GPU.
The first thing to come… Read More
Prototyping Kits to Accelerate IP Development & Integration into SoCs
With growing SoC size, complexity, software and hardware content in it and shrinking time-to-market, the SoC design completion in time has become increasingly dependent on IP which need to be sourced (internally or externally), customized according to the design need and integrated together into the SoC. While IP providers… Read More
Last VIP News of 2014
It’s likely that most of the current Semiwiki readers didn’t read this article posted in 2011, comparing Cadence and Synopsys with the Soviet Union and the USA, sharing the world in 1944 during the Yalta Conference. I was explaining in my post that Synopsys’s strong influence was on Design IP when Cadence’s preferred domain was … Read More
Synthesizing rad-tolerant RTL for FPGAs
The maiden voyage of NASA’s Orion spacecraft brought a raft of articles about how the flight computer inside is “no smarter than your phone,” running on wheezing IBM PowerPC 750FX processors. NASA’s deputy manager for Orion avionics, Matt Lemke, admits the configuration is already obsolete – at least in commercial terms. … Read More
Synopsys Q4 Earnings
Synopsys announced their earnings a couple of days ago. This is actually also the end of their fiscal year. They had quarterly earnings of $539M meaning that they did just over $2B for the year. Their guidance for fiscal 2015 is revenue between $2.185B to $2.225B. They said that about 80% of that revenue is already in backlog.
But it… Read More
Design Rule Checking (DRC) Meets New Challenges
The traditional batch-oriented DRC process run as a final check to ensure compliance with foundry yield goals is quickly moving toward a concurrent DRC process performed early and often throughout design, especially at the 28 nm and smaller process nodes. What are the technology factors causing this change?
- Increasing number