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





White Paper: A Closer Look at Aging on Clock Networks
We all know that designers work hard to reach design closure on SOC designs. However, what gets less attention from consumers is the effort that goes into ensuring that these chips will be fully operational and meeting timing specs over their projected lifetime. Of course, this is less important for chips used in devices with projected… Read More
Podcast EP55: A New Year’s Perspective with Dan and Mike
Dan and Mike take some time to review 2021 – the events that led to growth, opportunities and challenges and a discussion of what lies ahead.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in these podcasts belong solely to the speaker, and not to the speaker’s employer, organization, committee or any other group or individual.… Read More
DAC 2021 – Cliosoft Overview
It’s been awhile since I really looked at what Cliosoft has to offer in the EDA tool space, so at the 58th DAC I stopped by their exhibit booth on Tuesday to visit with Karim Khalfan, VP of Application Engineering, and Simon Rance, VP of Marketing. Their booth had all of the hot market segments listed: Automotive, 5G, IoT, AI, … Read More
Heterogeneous Integration – A Cost Analysis
Heterogeneous integration (HI) is a general term used to represent the diverse possibilities for die technology incorporated into advanced 2.5D/3D packaging. At the recent International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, a team from Synopsys and IC Knowledge presented data from analyses of future potential… Read More
2D NoC Based FPGAs Valuable for SmartNIC Implementation
Smart network interface cards (SmartNICs) have proven themselves valuable in improving network efficiency. According to Scott Schweitzer, senior product manager at Achronix, it has been shown that SmartNICs can relieve up to – and perhaps beyond – 30% of the host processor’s loading. SmartNICs started out taking… Read More
Methodology for Aging-Aware Static Timing Analysis
At the recent Design Automation Conference, Cadence presented their methodology for incorporating performance degradation measures due to device aging into a static timing analysis flow. [1] (The work was a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics.) This article reviews the highlights of their presentation.
Background… Read More
Delivering Systemic Innovation to Power the Era of SysMoore
With the slowing down of Moore’s law , the industry as a whole has been working on various ways to maintain the rate of growth and advancements. A lot has been written up about various solutions being pursued to address specific aspects. The current era is being referred to by different names, SysMoore being one that Synopsys uses.… Read More
DAC 2021 – Taming Process Variability in Semiconductor IP
Tuesday at DAC was actually my very first time attending a technical session, and the presentation from Nebabie Kebebew, Siemens EDA, was called, Mitigating Variability Challenges of IPs for Robust Designs. There were three presentations scheduled for that particular Designer, IP and Embedded Systems track, but with the COVID… Read More
5 Talks on RISC-V
Veriest recently hosted a webinar focusing on RISC-V as a forerunner of ongoing open-source revolution in chip design. Speakers were distinguished professionals from industry and academia. Webinar covered topics from market trends to open-source hardware initiatives, tools and methodologies.
Zvonimir Bandić: RISC-V … Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?