Big SoC designs typically break existing EDA tools and old methodologies, which then give rise to new EDA tools and methodologies out of necessity. Such is the case with the daunting task of verification planning and management where terabytes of data have simply swamped older EDA tools, making them unpleasant and ineffective… Read More
More things on the DSP frontier at MWC14
With a well-chronicled share inside cellular baseband interfaces for mobile devices, one might think that is the entire CEVA story, especially going into Mobile World Congress 2014 this week. MWC is still a phone show, but is becoming more and more about the Internet of Things and wearables, and CEVA and its ecosystem are showing… Read More
The Future of Money is Digital – Part 2
BitCoin Algorithm
Invented by a mystery person/group with the alias “Satoshi Nakamoto”. [You can read a consolidation of the paper here]. The essential elements are:
· Peer to Peer Network with self-validation
· Exponentially increasing compute cost
· Finite supply with exponential conversion
· Hidden in plain… Read More
Glasses Refocus Mobile Power Design
Contextual awareness likely will emerge as one of the most exciting new user experiences enabled by wearable products. It happens when a mobile device, carried or worn, senses the user’s surroundings and presents information, offers advice, or controls itself and/or other devices according to that specific environment. This… Read More
A Brief History of Kandou Bus
Kandou Bus uses a novel form of spatial coding to transmit data between wired chips. The main idea is to introduce correlations between the signals sent on the interface, and choose the correlations judiciously to lower the power consumption, increase the speed, and lower the footprint. It is a generalization of differential … Read More
SEMICON China Shanghai 上海
SEMICON is not just the event in San Francisco every July, there are other SEMICONs around the world. Coming up next, Shanghai China. In fact there are four colocated events:
- SEMICON China 2014, March 18th-20th
- The 8th PV fab managers’ forum, March 17th-18th (all things PhotoVoltaic)
- FPD China 2014, March 18th-20th (all
A Methodology for Assertion Reuse in SoC Designs
As your SoC design can contain hundreds of IP blocks, how do you verify that all of the IP blocks will still work together correctly once assembled? Well, you could run lots of functional verification at the full-chip level and hope for the best in terms of code coverage and expected behavior. You could buy an expensive emulator to … Read More
2014 Semiconductor Growth Could be 2X 2013 Rate
The fourth quarter 2013 semiconductor market declined 0.8% from the third quarter, according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS). Full year 2013 growth was 4.8%. Our most recent 2013 forecast at Semiconductor Intelligence was 6% in November 2013, based on expectations of positive growth in 4Q 2013. Who had the most… Read More
6 reasons Synopsys covets C/C++ static analysis
By now, you’ve probably seen the news on Synopsys acquiring Coverity, and a few thoughts from our own Paul McLellan and Daniel Payne in commentary, who I respect deeply – and I’m guessing there are many like them out there in the EDA community scratching their heads a little or a lot at this. I’m not from corporate, but I am here… Read More
Mounir Hahad Rejoins Silvaco
Mounir Hahad just joined Silvaco as VP engineering. And when I say joined I really mean rejoined. I had a call with him to find out how that happened.
Mounir studied in France for a PhD in computer science on numerical computing. In 1995 the then-director of TCAD at Silvaco called him up having read some of his published papers. Silvaco… Read More
Real men have fabs!