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Career Change Advice and how EDA Hiring has Changed

Career Change Advice and how EDA Hiring has Changed
by Mark Gilbert on 08-05-2018 at 7:00 am

I think most of us can attest that changing jobs is one of the most stressful decisions we make, as our careers progress. Making a job change is rarely an easy decision, though admittedly, so wonderful when it accomplishes your career and life goals. Having the right, well thought out expectations is the best way to ensure success,… Read More


An update on the Design Productivity Gap

An update on the Design Productivity Gap
by Tom Dillinger on 08-03-2018 at 12:00 pm

Over a decade ago, a group of semiconductor industry experts published a landmark paper as part of the periodic updates to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, or ITRS for short (link). The ITRS identified a critical design productivity gap. The circuit capacity afforded by the Moore’s Law pace of technology… Read More


Speak N Spell

Speak N Spell
by Daniel Nenni on 08-03-2018 at 7:00 am

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

Success has many authors and the Speak & Spell product from Texas Instruments generated lots of write-ups to demonstrate this. For most of the semiconductor industry, results of innovation were not apparent to the masses but, for the consumer … Read More


Netspeed and NSITEXE talk about automotive design trends at 55DAC

Netspeed and NSITEXE talk about automotive design trends at 55DAC
by Tom Simon on 08-02-2018 at 12:00 pm

DAC is where both sides of the design equation come together for discussion and learning. This is what makes attending DAC discussion panels so interesting; you are going to hear from providers of tools, methodologies and IP as well as those who need to use them to deliver working solutions. There are few places where the interplay… Read More


KLAC gets an EUV Kicker

KLAC gets an EUV Kicker
by Robert Maire on 08-02-2018 at 7:00 am

KLAC put up a great quarter coming in at revenues of $1.07B and EPS of $2.22. Guidance is for $1.03B to $1.1B with EPS of $2 to $2.32. Both reported and guided were at the high end of the range and above consensus. We had suggested in our preview notes that KLAC would be the least impacted of the big three (AMAT, LRCX & KLAC) semi equipment… Read More


Accelerating the PCB Design-Analysis Optimization Loop

Accelerating the PCB Design-Analysis Optimization Loop
by Tom Dillinger on 08-01-2018 at 12:00 pm

With the increasing complexity and diversity of the mechanical constraints and electrical requirements in electronic product development, printed circuit board designers are faced with a number of difficult challenges:

  • generating accurate (S-parameter) simulation models for critical interface elements of the design
Read More

AMS Experts Share IC Design Stories at #55DAC

AMS Experts Share IC Design Stories at #55DAC
by Daniel Payne on 08-01-2018 at 7:00 am

At #55DAC in SFO the first day is always the busiest on the exhibit floor, so Monday by lunch time I was hungry and took a short walk to the Marriott hotel nearby to listen to AMS experts from several companies talk about their EDA tool use, hosted by Synopsys:

  • Samsung
  • Toshiba Memory Corp.
  • NVIDIA
  • Seagate
  • Numem
  • Esperanto
Read More

Verification Importance in Academia

Verification Importance in Academia
by Alex Tan on 07-31-2018 at 12:00 pm

“Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence,” stated the famous computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. That notion rings true to the many college participants of the Hack@DAC competition offered during DAC 2018 in San Francisco. The goal of this competition is to develop tools and methods for identifying security… Read More


Webinar: Differential Energy Analysis for Improved Performance/Watt in Mobile GPU

Webinar: Differential Energy Analysis for Improved Performance/Watt in Mobile GPU
by Bernard Murphy on 07-31-2018 at 7:00 am

May want to listen up; Qualcomm are going to be sharing how they do this. There is a constant battle in designing for low power; you don’t accurately know what the power consumption is going to be until you build it, but by the time you’ve built it, it’s too late to change the design. So you have to find methods to estimate power early on,… Read More


Machine Learning Meets Scan Diagnosis for Improved Yield Analysis

Machine Learning Meets Scan Diagnosis for Improved Yield Analysis
by Tom Simon on 07-30-2018 at 12:00 pm

Naturally, chips that fail test are a curse, however with the advent of Scan Logic Diagnosis these failures can become a blessing in disguise. Through this technique information gleaned from multiple tester runs can help pin down the locations of defects. Initially tools that did Scan Logic Diagnosis relied on the netlist to filter… Read More