I recently was introduced to a white paper written by John Stabenow, Director at Mentor, a Siemens Business, that gave an excellent overview of things to consider before launching into the design of an IoT edge project. John starts the paper with a quote from Pliny the Elder (A.D.23-A.D.79) who said, “The best plan is, as the common… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
CES Preview with Cadence!
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is in its 50th year believe it or not! The first one was in New York (1967) with 250 exhibitors and 17,500 attendees. Portable radios and TVs were all the rage followed by VCRs in 1970 and camcorders and compact discs in 1981. This year there will be 3,900+ exhibits and an estimated 170,000 attendees… Read More
Snapback behavior determines ESD protection effectiveness
Terms like avalanche breakdown and impact ionization sound like they come from the world of science fiction. They do indeed come from a high stakes world, but one that plays out over and over again here and now, on a microscopic scale in semiconductor devices – namely as part of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. Semiconductor… Read More
Shifting Left with Static and Formal Verification
Unless you have been living in a cave for the last several years, by now you know that “Shift Left” is a big priority in product design and delivery, and particularly in verification. Within the semiconductor industry I believe Intel coined this term as early as 2002, though it seems now to be popular throughout all forms of technology… Read More
DSP Benchmarks and Libraries for ARC DSP families
Synopsys DesignWareARC HS4xD family is a perfect example of high performance DSP, enhanced RISC CPU IP core, able to address high-end IoT, mid to high-end audio or baseband control. ARC HS4xD architecture is 10-stage pipeline for high Fmax, resulting in excellent RISC efficiency with 5.2 CoreMark per MHz. ARC EMxD processors… Read More
Starblaze Uses Synopsys DesignWare IP to Launch SSD Controller SoC
I recently wrote an article about Synopsys’ DesignWare Security IP for the Internet-of-Things market and was interested to see that a startup, Starblaze Technology, has now used parts of the same IP in its latest Solid-State Drive (SSD) controller. The security IP caught my eye, but the rest of the story really put things into focus.… Read More
Creative Noise-Reduction in Automotive AMS
Automotive applications are one of the hottest domains today in semiconductor design. We’re bombarded daily with articles on new hybrids, electric cars, ADAS and autonomous cars, trucks and busses. All of these applications are certainly amazing, but the devices that make them work still have to deal with the same old challenges,… Read More
Synopsys White Paper on IoT Security – Introduces DesignWare Root-of-Trust Module
As the internet of things (IoT) continues its climb to a trillion devices, there has been many articles and books written on the need for securing those devices. With all the IoT gear that I seem to be picking up as Christmas presents, I feel like I’m doing my part to help the market get there, but I have to say, I sure hope the SoC designers… Read More
When Invaluable Kills Business
Productivity is notoriously hard to sell. I recently visited a company where the engineering team wanted to evaluate one of our FPGA debug and analysis products on an existing board. This board had an FPGA that we supported and had all the required connectivity – it could just be used ‘out of the box’. Our tool – Exostiv… Read More
High Calibre Development Keeps Mentor on Top of the Game
One might be tempted to think that technology driven gains in computer performance might be enough to keep up with the needs of design and verification tools. We know that design complexity is increasing at a rate predicted by Moore’s Law. We also know that the performance of the computers used during IC development benefit from … Read More


Solving the EDA tool fragmentation crisis