Everything is becoming digital, and everything digital requires semiconductors. Cadence’s President and CEO, Dr. Anirudh Devgan, highlighted this at the recent CadenceLIVE user conference and discussed many of the company’s accomplishments and future directions. Dr. Devgan also sees the emergence of data—especially … Read More




Podcast EP91: A Tour of Agile Analog’s Ground-Breaking Technology with its New CEO, Barry Paterson
Dan is joined by Barry Paterson, Agile Analog’s new CEO. Barry has held senior leadership, engineering and product management roles at Wolfson Microelectronics and Dialog Semiconductor. He has been involved in the development of custom mixed-signal silicon solutions for many of the leading mobile and consumer electronics… Read More
Using IP-XACT, RTL and UPF for Efficient SoC Design
The ESD Alliance collects and reports every quarter the revenue trends for both EDA and Semiconductor IP (SiP), and the biggest component for the past few years has been the SiP, as IP re-use dominates new designs. For Q4 of 2021 the total SiP revenue was $1,314.3 Million, enjoying a 24.8% growth in just one year. Here’s a chart… Read More
Using an IDE to Accelerate Hardware Language Learning
Recently, in one of my regular check-ins with AMIQ EDA, I was pleased that they linked me up with an active customer. The resulting post summarized my discussion with three engineers from Kepler Communications Inc. They talked about using one of the AMIQ EDA products in the design of FPGAs for space-borne Internet connectivity.… Read More
Stalling to Uncover Timing Bugs. Innovation in Verification
Artificially stalling datapaths and virtual channels is a creative method to uncover corner case timing bugs. A paper from Nvidia describes a refinement to this technique. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue… Read More
Intel Foundry Services Puts PDKs in the Cloud
Intel announced today that they are partnering with cloud and EDA companies to better enable their foundry business. This is a natural extension of the Accelerator ecosystem program announced earlier. More and more chip designs are being done in the cloud and from my experience cloud based designs are better. Some companies use… Read More
Imec Buried Power Rail and Backside Power Delivery at VLSI
At the VLSI Technology Symposium Imec presented on Buried Power Rails (BPR) and Backside Power Delivery (BSPD) in a paper entitled: “Scaled FinFETs Connected by Using Both Wafer Sides for Routing via Buried Power Rails”. I recently had a chance to interview one of the authors, Naoto Horiguchi about the work. I have interviewed … Read More
Time is of the Essence for High-Frequency Traders
In the world of financial trading, nanoseconds count. The faster a trade can be accomplished, the more money a trader can make. Getting a trade in before a competitor also results in improved profits. What does this have to do with the partnership deal recently inked between Silicon Creations and Achronix? Plenty. The two companies… Read More
TSMC 2022 Technology Symposium Review – Advanced Packaging Development
TSMC recently held their annual Technology Symposium in Santa Clara, CA. The presentations provide a comprehensive overview of their technology status and upcoming roadmap, covering all facets of the process technology and advanced packaging development. This article will summarize the highlights of the advanced packaging… Read More
Multiphysics, Multivariate Analysis: An Imperative for Today’s 3D-IC Designs
Semiconductor manufacturers are under constantly increasing and intense pressure to accelerate innovative new chip designs to market faster than ever in smaller package sizes while assuring signal integrity and reducing power consumption. Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D-ICs) promise to answer all these demands… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption