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CEO Interview: Jason Xing of ICScape Inc.

CEO Interview: Jason Xing of ICScape Inc.
by Randy Smith on 05-19-2013 at 12:00 am

I recently had the opportunity to interview Jason Xing, Ph.D., CEO and President of ICScape, Inc. Below is a subset of the nearly two hour long interview.

How did you first become involved in EDA?
My EDA career started in the mid-90s when I started working on my PhD thesis at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. My thesis… Read More


#50DAC: Winning in Monte Carlo!

#50DAC: Winning in Monte Carlo!
by Daniel Nenni on 05-18-2013 at 4:00 pm

One of the places you will be able to find me at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) is on the speaker panel for a Monday Tutorial – Winning in Monte Carlo: Managing Simulations Under Variability and Reliability. Having worked closely with TSMC, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Solido Design Automation, and some of the top fabless semiconductor… Read More


SoC Optimization Using FPGA Prototyping

SoC Optimization Using FPGA Prototyping
by Daniel Payne on 05-18-2013 at 11:00 am

As an engineer I learn new concepts best by seeing a demonstration, in this case it was a demo of how to optimize SoC performance by using an ASIC prototyping debug process. SoC designers that use FPGAs to prototype their new ASIC often encounter debug issues, like:

  • Limited observability of internal nets required for debug, maybe
Read More

5G – Reality or Fiction

5G – Reality or Fiction
by Pawan Fangaria on 05-17-2013 at 7:30 pm

Early in this week, I was reading news about Samsung announcing its breakthrough 5G mmWave technology. Well, this can bring fastest smart phone in the world which could enable several functions of day-to-day life and become revolutionary. The technology is not ready for commercial use, its building blocks seems to be working.… Read More


RTL Power Estimation at DAC

RTL Power Estimation at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 05-17-2013 at 7:22 pm

If you design with ARMCores and need to estimate dynamic power early in the flow, then consider what STMicroelectronics has done with their high performance, power-efficient subsystems. Anne Merlande is a Processor Micro Architecture technical expert, and will be presenting in Booth #1346 at DACon June 4th, 2:00PM. Her topic… Read More


IC Design with No Clocks Used in a SMART Card

IC Design with No Clocks Used in a SMART Card
by Daniel Payne on 05-17-2013 at 5:21 pm

My IC design career started at Intel with DRAM chips, so I’m very familiar with clockless design because we used self-timed techniques to get maximum performance. I remember blogging about an asynchronous design company called Tiempo back in 2010, while blogging at Chip Design Magazine. A few weeks ago there was a press … Read More


Are you going to the plug fest?

Are you going to the plug fest?
by Eric Esteve on 05-17-2013 at 10:16 am

PCI Express 3.0 specification is 1000 pages long. Most of us, and most of the designers integrating PCIe gen-3 into their latest ASIC, FPGA or system will probably never read it completely, or even open it. In fact, they don’t need to read it completely, but they should care about one point, whether they buy an ASSP or a PCIe design IP:… Read More


Atrenta CEO on RTL Signoff

Atrenta CEO on RTL Signoff
by Daniel Nenni on 05-16-2013 at 9:00 pm

Most EDA companies sell tools into the main chip design and implementation flow such as simulation, synthesis, place & route, custom design and mask data prep. Atrenta is different. Nothing the company sells is in this main design flow. Instead, Atrenta focuses on pre-synthesis design analysis and optimization. Everything… Read More


AMD Reduces Power by 20%

AMD Reduces Power by 20%
by Paul McLellan on 05-16-2013 at 4:12 pm

Steve Kommrusch of AMD wrote a white paper with Calypto on how AMD reduced power by 20% on the Jaguar SoC using Calypto’s PowerPro. Dan Nenni blogged about it on SemiWiki back in February here. And now, drumroll, Steve will present the story live and in person at DAC, on Monday June 3rd at 3pm and on Wednesday June 5th at 11am. This… Read More


Cadence Technical Sessions @ #50DAC (Free Food!)

Cadence Technical Sessions @ #50DAC (Free Food!)
by Daniel Nenni on 05-16-2013 at 10:00 am


Cadence is a DAC anchor, everyone will visit their booth, so lets look at their technical sessions and put our agendas together. Lets start with the breakfast/lunch sessions because Cadence usually puts out quite a spread, we all gotta eat and free food tastes even better:

Has “Timing Signoff Innovation” Become an Oxymoron? WhatRead More