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1-on-1 with Anirudh Devgan, President, Cadence

1-on-1 with Anirudh Devgan, President, Cadence
by Tom Dillinger on 07-27-2018 at 12:00 pm

At the Design Automation Conference, no one is busier than an EDA company executive — conference panels, product launch briefings, customer meetings, and corporate dinners all place considerable demands on their time. I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with Anirudh Devgan, President of Cadence, at the recent DAC55 in San… Read More


Stubbornness Captures an Entire Disruptive Technology and Leads to an Academy Award

Stubbornness Captures an Entire Disruptive Technology and Leads to an Academy Award
by Daniel Nenni on 07-27-2018 at 7:00 am

This is the eighth in the series of “20 Questions with Wally Rhines”

In 1972, I joined TI and was assigned to work on a new contract that had just been awarded and badly needed staffing. The U.S. Department of Defense had decided that solid-state charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors were going to be a strategic technology… Read More


Low Cost Power NB-IoT Solution? Fusion F1 DSP based Modem!

Low Cost Power NB-IoT Solution? Fusion F1 DSP based Modem!
by Eric Esteve on 07-26-2018 at 12:00 pm

Supporting NB-IoT requires low cost (optimized silicon footprint) and ultra-low power solution to cope with IoT device requirement. Cadence Fusion F1 DSP IP has been integrated in modem IC by two new customers, Xinyi and Rafael, gaining traction in NB-IoT market. These design-win builds on previous momentum: software GPS solution… Read More


Cadence Selected to Support Major DARPA Program

Cadence Selected to Support Major DARPA Program
by Bernard Murphy on 07-26-2018 at 7:00 am

When DARPA plans programs, they’re known for going big – really big. Which is what they are doing again with their Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI). Abstracting from their intro, this is a program “to ensure far-reaching improvements in electronics performance well beyond the limits of traditional scaling”. This isn’t… Read More


Autonomous Driving and Functional Safety

Autonomous Driving and Functional Safety
by Tom Dillinger on 07-25-2018 at 12:00 pm

The timelines proposed by automobile manufacturers for enabling fully autonomous driving are extremely aggressive. At the recent DAC55 conference in San Francisco, I attended a panel discussion on Functional Safety issues for assisted and autonomous driving, sponsored by Mentor Graphics. I also had the opportunity to chat… Read More


Optimization and Reliability for FinFET designs at #55DAC

Optimization and Reliability for FinFET designs at #55DAC
by Daniel Payne on 07-25-2018 at 7:00 am

TSMC is the leading foundry worldwide and they make a big splash each year at the DAC exhibit and conference, so I stopped by their theatre area during the presentation from IP vendor Moortec to see what’s new this year. Stephen Crosher was the presenter from Moortec and we had exchanged emails before, so this was the first time… Read More


Automotive is setting the goalposts for next generation designs

Automotive is setting the goalposts for next generation designs
by Tom Simon on 07-24-2018 at 12:00 pm

Automotive applications are having a tremendous influence on semiconductor design. This influence is coming from innovations in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, communications, sensors that all serve the requirements of the automotive market. It should come as no surprise that ADAS and autonomous driving are … Read More


Innovation in IoT

Innovation in IoT
by Bernard Murphy on 07-24-2018 at 7:00 am

There is some interesting work reported this month in the Communications of the ACM, on novel sensing, multi-purpose uses for existing sensors and new ideas in agricultural IoT. The article opens on a method called Hitch-hike to use back-scatter methods for communication; I confess this doesn’t interest me so much, so I won’t … Read More


Keeping Pace With 5nm Heartbeat

Keeping Pace With 5nm Heartbeat
by Alex Tan on 07-23-2018 at 12:00 pm

A Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) gives design a heartbeat. Despite its minute footprint, it has many purposes such as being part of the clock generation circuits, on-chip digital temperature sensor, process control monitoring in the scribe-line or as baseline circuitry to facilitate an effective measurement of the design’s power… Read More


FDSOI Status and Roadmap

FDSOI Status and Roadmap
by Scotten Jones on 07-23-2018 at 7:00 am

FDSOI is gaining traction in the market place. At their foundry forum in May, Samsung announced they have 17 FDSOI products in high volume manufacturing (you can read Tom Dilliger’s write up of the Samsung Foundry Forum here). At SEMICON West in July, GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) announced FDSOI design wins worth $2 billion dollars in … Read More