The IT industry marvels like augmented reality and artificial intelligence, which marked technological utopianism in the science fiction movies during the 1970s and 1980s, are here now, enabled by a machine-learning technique called deep learning.… Read More





Free Copy of EDAgraffiti!
Last month we offered a free PDF version of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”, for the greater good. More than thirteen thousand people have downloaded it thus far so we would like to keep the momentum going with another book giveaway. Paul McLellan has graciously offered his book… Read More
Eliminating the Chasm of Computing
The world has come through a long way from the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] UNIVAC computer in 1952, IBM mainframes and minicomputers in secured computer rooms to laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and so on in our hands. Imagine the compute power of a minicomputer then and the compute power of your smartphone or tablet today. And do you know the… Read More
Why Your IP Release Methodology Can Make or Break Reuse Success
When the term IP first came into popular usage for IC design, it was primarily conceived as blocks of design content that were bought occasionally from external sources. A customer might use one or two in a design, and expect one delivery with perhaps some minor updates before tapeout. Over the last 18 years, this notion has changed… Read More
Simulating Full-System EMI for a Car in Just 28 Minutes
While there’s a lot of cool technology in modern semiconductors, it’s important to raise our sights periodically to understand how well these chips will work in the systems for which they are designed. One area driving a lot of semiconductor growth is automobile electronics. We’ve had drive-train control forever it seems, but… Read More
ARM Keil Ecosystem Integrates Atmel SAM ESV7
Even the best System-on-Chip is useless without software, as well as the best designed S/W needs H/W to flourish. The “old” embedded world has exploded into many emergent markets like IoT, wearable, and automotive is no more restricted to motor control or airbags as innovative products, from entertainment to ADAS are being developed.… Read More
Three New Things from ITC this year
The NFL has its annual Super Bowl contest each year, EDA vendors attend DAC, then the test folks attend ITCwhich was in Anaheim a few weeks ago. I’ve marketed ATGP, BIST and DFT tools before so I like to keep updated on what’s happening at conferences like ITC. Robert Ruiz from Synopsys spoke with me by phone to provide … Read More
Why FPGA synthesis with Synplify is now faster
The headline of the latest Synopsys press release drops quite a tease: the newest release of Synplify delivers up to 3x faster runtime performance in FPGA synthesis. In our briefing for this post, we uncovered the surprising reason why – and it’s not found in their press release.… Read More
FinFET Reliability Analysis with Device Self-Heating
At the recent TSMC OIP symposium, a collaborative presentation by Synopsys and Xilinx highlighted the importance of incorporating the local FinFET device self-heating temperature increase on the acceleration of device reliability mechanisms.… Read More
How Virtualization Makes Network Processor Verification Efficient
When Ethernet was introduced in 1983 it ran at 10Mbps and mostly relied on hubs and coaxial cable. Twelve years later a faster speed was introduced, running at 100Mbps. Since then we have seen an acceleration of new data rate introductions. According top the Ethernet Alliance, Ethernet could have 12 speeds before 2020, with 6 of … Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography