Pratik Mahajan, Synopsys VC Formal R&D Group Director, kicked off an absorbing event featuring talks from multiple customers in Europe. He spent some time on formal signoff, an important topic that I’m still not sure is fully understood. Answering the questions “OK, we did a bunch of formal checking but how does that affect… Read More





RISC-V is Building Momentum
The semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) market is an integral part of the semiconductor industry. Third-party IP has propelled the industry, opening the door for many new products from start-ups to established IDMs. Enabling increasingly complex devices, reducing the cost of product development and reducing the time… Read More
How Mentor became Siemens EDA
When I started in EDA the big three were Daisy, Mentor and Valid (DMV as we called them). Then came Synopsys in 1986 followed by Cadence, which was a clever merger between ECAD (Dracula DRC) and Solomon Design. Daisy and Valid were pushed aside and then there were, “Three dogs hovering over one bowl of dog food, not a pretty site.”… Read More
Tesla’s License to Kill
Even as Honda Motors puts a so-called Level 3 semi-autonomous vehicle on the road in Japan – 100 of them to be exact – the outrage grows over semi-autonomous vehicle tech requiring driver vigilance. Tesla Motors and General Motors have taken this plunge, creating a driving scenario where drivers – under certain circumstances … Read More
The Quest for Bugs: “Deep Cycles”
Verification is a resource limited ‘quest’ to find as many bugs as possible before shipping. It’s a long, difficult, costly search, constrained by cost, time and quality. For a multi-billion gate ASIC,
The search space is akin to a space search; practically infinite
In this article we talk about the quest for bugs at the system-level,… Read More
Podcast EP14: AI at the Edge
Dan and Mike are joined by Semir Haddad, senior director of product marketing at Eta Compute and Vineet Ganju, vice president and general manager, low power edge AI business at Synaptics. Semir and Vineet discuss the collaboration between Eta Compute and Synaptics to develop new and innovative solutions for AI applications… Read More
Semiconductor Startups – Are they back?
Semiconductor startups used to rule the roost in Silicon Valley. The very name, Silicon Valley, comes from the birth of the semiconductor industry in the San Francisco bay area 60+ years ago. Large percentage of venture financing used to go to semiconductor startups, even as recently as 15 years ago. As a chip designer doing startups… Read More
AUGER, the First User Group Meeting for Agnisys
As a long-time member of the EDA community, I really believe in user groups. EDA tools are complicated beasts, with many options and different ways to use them, and they are constantly evolving. Users interact with their local field applications engineers (FAEs) and sometimes corporate AEs (product specialists) as well on a regular… Read More
Bouncing off the Walls – How Real-Time Radar is Accelerating the Development of Autonomous Vehicles
In the race to get people out of the driver’s seat, the developers of autonomous vehicles (AV) and advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) have gone off road and into the virtual world.
Using simulation to design, train and validate the brains behind self-driving cars — the neural networks of sensors and systems that perceive… Read More
VersionVault EDA Integration: A Differentiated Value Solution
HCL Technologies is a large, well-established multi-national company with an annual revenue of around $10B and worldwide employee count of well over 150K. They provide valuable solutions to about 20 different industries and related market segments. Over the years, I have had first hand insights to their semiconductor design… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet