During DVCon 2018 in San Jose, one topic widely covered was the necessity of describing and capturing intent. Defining our design intent up-front is crucial to the overall success of a design implementation. It is not limited to applying a process level intent, such as the use of verification intent with embedded assertions in … Read More





Emulation Outside the Box
We all know the basic premise of emulation: hardware-assisted simulation running much faster than software-based simulation, with comparable accuracy for cycle-based 0/1 modeling, decently fast setup, and comparably fine-grained debug support. Pretty obvious value for running big jobs with long tests. But emulators tend… Read More
Cleaning Trends for Advanced Nodes
I was invited to give a talk at the Business of Cleans Conference held by Linx Consulting in Boston on April 9th. I am not a cleans expert but rather was invited more to give an overview talk on process technology trends and the impact on cleans. In this write up I will discuss my presentation. I discussed each of the three main leading-edge… Read More
SPIE Advanced Lithography 2018 – ASML Update on EUV
At the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in February ASML gave an update on their EUV systems, in this blog I will provide a summary of what they presented. I have also written about my impressions on EUV for the overall conference here.… Read More
NVIDIA GTC 2018 Then There Were Three
If there was a central takeaway to Nvidia’s GTC event last week in San Jose it was this: autonomous vehicles are already operating or at least testing in virtual every corner of the planet including companies such as Tier IV and ZMP in Japan, and Pony.ai and Baidu in China. But two U.S. companies standout globally for the growing… Read More
The Good the Bad and Tesla and Uber
In “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” circa 1971, Gene Wilder plays a vaguely misanthropic Willy Wonka who leads the young winners of his golden wrapper contest on a tour of the seven deadly sins within his candy factory and labs. (Who can forget Augustus Gloop?) At one point, Mike Teavee, a television-obsessed… Read More
EDA CEO Outlook 2018
The EDA CEO outlook took an interesting turn last night but before I get into that I will offer a few comments about the start of the show. I attend this event every year for the content but also for the networking. It isn’t everyday you get to hang out with semiconductor industry elite and have candid conversations over food and drinks.… Read More
The 4th Way Beyond Simulation, FPGA Synthesis, and Emulation
As verification continues to be a key ingredient in successful design implementation, new approaches have been tried to balance cost, time to results and comprehensive analysis in designs that require large patterns in some application like Image Processing. Simulation environments are well proven, and designers tend to … Read More
Stress and Aging
These failings aren’t just a cross we humans bear; they’re also a concern for chips, particularly in electrical over-stress (EOS) and aging of the circuitry. Such concerns are not new, but they are taking on new urgency given the high reliability and long lifetime expectations we have for safety-critical components in cars and… Read More
Mentor Leads Emulation Innovation
Publishing eBooks on FPGA Prototyping and Emulation really was an eye opener for me as a long time EDA and IP professional. Both markets are considered EDA in the traditional sense but they are very much in the systems business with a lot of IP. Both markets are also growing very rapidly and operate side-by-side with complimentary… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet