Recently, one of those very restrained press releases – in this case, Mentor Graphics and Imagination Technologiesextending their partnership for MIPS software support– crossed my desk with about 10% of the story. The 90% of this story I want to focus on is why Mentor is putting energy into this partnership… Read More





Cutting Debug Time of an SoC
The amount of time spent debugging an SoC dwarfs the actual design time, with many engineering teams saying that debug and verification takes about 7X the effort as the actual design work. So any automation to reduce the amount of time spent in debug and verification would directly impact the product schedule in a big way.
An example… Read More
A Brief History of Magillem
Founders
Cyril Spasevski is the President, CTO and founding engineer at Magillem, bringing a team of engineers, all experts with an SoC platform builder tool. In 2006 Cyril and his team met a seasoned business woman, and decided to form Magillem. Design teams were struggling with different tools at different stages of the flow,… Read More
A Brief History of TSMC’s OIP part 2
The existence of TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) program further sped up disaggregation of the semiconductor supply chain. Partly, this was enabled by the existence of a healthy EDA industry and an increasingly healthy IP industry. As chip designs had grown more complex and entered the system-on-chip (SoC) era, the amount… Read More
Texture decompression is the point for mobile GPUs
In the first post of this series, we named the popular methods for texture compression in OpenGL ES, particularly Imagination Technologies PVRTC on all Apple and many Android mobile devices. Now, let’s explore what texture compression involves, what PVRTC does, and how it differs from other approaches.… Read More
Samsung 28nm Beats Intel 22nm!
There was some serious backlash to the “Intel Bay Trail Fail” blog I posted last week, mostly personal attacks by the spoon fed Intel faithful, but there are however some very interesting points made amongst the 30+ comments so be sure and read them when you have a chance.
The Business insider article “The iPhone… Read More
How Do You Do Computational Photography at HD Video Rates?
Increasingly, a GPU is misnamed as a “graphics” processing unit. They are really specialized architecture highly parallel compute engines. You can use these compute engines for graphics, of course, but people are inventive and find ways of using GPUs for other tasks that can take advantage of the highly parallel… Read More
Early Test –> Less Expensive, Better Health, Faster Closure
I am talking about the health of electronic and semiconductor design, which if made sound at RTL stage, can set it right for the rest of the design cycle for faster closure and also at lesser cost. Last week was the week of ITC(International Test Conference) for the Semiconductor and EDA community. I was looking forward to what ITC… Read More
Mentor Teaches Us About the Higg’s Boson
Once a year Mentor has a customer appreciation event in Silicon Valley with a guest speaker on some aspect of science. This is silicon valley, after all, so we all have to be geeks. This year it was Dr Sean Carroll from CalTech on The Particle at the End of the Universe, the Hunt for The Higg’s Boson and What’s Next.
Wally … Read More
EDAC Export Seminar: Don’t Know This Stuff…Go Directly to Jail…Do Not Pass Go
I am not making this up: All exports from the United States of EDA software and services are controlled under the Export Administration Regulations, administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). You need to understand these regulations. Failure to comply can result in severe … Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside