The diamond jewelry industry encourages customers to focus on the 4C’s — cut, clarity, color, and carats. At the recent PCB Forum conducted by Mentor (a Siemens business) in Santa Clara, I learned that current system design flows also require an emphasis on the 4C’s — collaboration, concurrency, consistency… Read More





Webinar: Getting to Formal Coverage
Facing rapidly growing challenges in getting to respectable coverage, designers have been turning more and more to formal verification, not just to plug gaps but increasingly to take over verification of significant components of the testplan. Which is great, but at the end of the day any approach to verification must be measured… Read More
Virtual Reality
In the world of hardware emulators, virtualization is a hot and sometimes contentious topic. It’s hot because emulators are expensive, creating a lot of pressure to maximize return on that investment through multi-user sharing and 24×7 operation. And of course in this cloud-centric world it doesn’t hurt to promote cloud-like… Read More
Autonomous Vehicles: Tesla, Uber, Lyft, BMW, Intel and Mentor Graphics
I read at least one hour of news every day to keep informed, and I’ve read so many stories about autonomous vehicles that the same, familiar company names continue to dominate the thought leadership. What really caught my attention this month was an announcement about autonomous vehicle technology coming from Mentor Graphics… Read More
SPIE 2017 – ASML Interview and Presentations
At the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference I sat down with Mike Lercel, Director of Strategic Marketing for ASML for an update. ASML also presented several papers at the conference and I attended many of these. In this article, I will discuss my interview with Mike and summarize the ASML presentations.… Read More
Making Cars Smarter And Safer
The news media has naturally focused on the handful of deaths that have occurred while auto-pilot features have been enabled. In reality, automobile deaths are occurring at a lower rate now than ever. In 2014 the rate was 1.08 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Compare that to the 5.06 per 100M miles in 1960, or a whopping 24.09 in… Read More
An Ultra-Low Voltage CPU
A continuing challenge for large scale deployment of IoT devices is the need to minimize service/cost by extending battery life to decades. At these lifetimes, devices become effectively disposable (OK – a new recycling challenge) and maintenance may amount to no more than replacing a dead unit with a new unit. Getting to these… Read More
The Importance of EM, IR and Thermal Analysis for IC Design – Webinar
Designing an IC has both a logical and physical aspect to it, so while the logic in your next chip may be bug-free and meet the spec, how do you know if the physical layout will be reliable in terms of EM (electro-migration), IR (voltage drops) and thermal issues? EDA software once again comes to our rescue to perform the specific type… Read More
A New Product for DRC and LVS that Lives in the Cloud
Back in the day the Dracula tool from Cadence was king of the DRC and LVS world for physical IC verification, however more recently we’ve seen Calibre from Mentor Graphics as the leader in this realm. Cadence wanted to reclaim their earlier prominence in physical verification so they had to come out with something different… Read More
Live from the TSMC Earnings Call!
Last week I was invited to attend the TSMC earnings call at the Shangri-la Hotel in Taipei which was QUITE the experience. I generally listen in on the calls and/or read the transcripts but this was the first one I attended live. I didn’t really know what to expect but I certainly did NOT expect something out of Hollywood. Seriously,… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?