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A Brief History of Chips and Technologies

A Brief History of Chips and Technologies
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2013 at 4:26 pm

I talked to Dado Banatao today. He is managing partner at Tallwood Venture Capital today but back in the mid-1980s he was the founder of Chips and Technologies, the first fabless semiconductor company. The rumors that they had a hard time raising money because VCs couldn’t comprehend a fabless semiconductor company are … Read More


RealTime Register Retiming

RealTime Register Retiming
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2013 at 7:00 am

I was at the EDAC CEO forecast meeting last week and one of the questions that was asked of EDAC members was “which is the hottest EDA startup?” The one with the most nominations was Oasys. So Oasys is hot.

But register retiming is hotter.

The latest announcement from Oasys this morning is that register retiming is now … Read More


A tour of today’s Mixed-Signal solution

A tour of today’s Mixed-Signal solution
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-18-2013 at 10:00 pm


Mixed-Signal design is one of the very initial design methodologies, pioneered by Cadence with its lead in custom design; now taking centre space in the world of SoCs. Its growth is surmountable as it finds its place in most of the high growth electronics like smart phones, automotive applications, networks and communications,… Read More


Mobile: A Death in the Family

Mobile: A Death in the Family
by Paul McLellan on 03-18-2013 at 3:49 pm

So Ericsson Mobile Platforms is to be shut down, with the loss of around 1600 jobs. Not to mention billions of dollars that ST and Ericsson sunk into the joint venture in an attempt to create a competitor to Qualcomm.

The history actually goes back a bit further. Nokia originally had an internal semiconductor design group and in 2007… Read More


Create Beyond the NoC Solutions!

Create Beyond the NoC Solutions!
by Eric Esteve on 03-18-2013 at 9:09 am

The Network On Chip (NoC) concept is recent, about 10 years old, and the first implementation of commercially available NoC IP has happened in 2006. Should we drop the concept so quickly after it has been introduced? In fact, I don’t think so… But we could brain storm and imagine the new functions that could be implemented within or… Read More


Schematic Migration Across Foundries and Processes

Schematic Migration Across Foundries and Processes
by Daniel Nenni on 03-17-2013 at 8:10 pm

A dedicated schematic migration tool can save weeks of effort and allow companies to explore new foundry opportunities. Unfortunately moving analog and mixed signal design data between foundries and processes is a complex business. While engineers would rather spend their days creating new circuits, many spend time translating… Read More


Cadence IP Report Card 2013

Cadence IP Report Card 2013
by Daniel Nenni on 03-17-2013 at 7:00 pm

The challenges of developing IP blocks, integrating them correctly, and hitting the power, performance, area, and time to market requirements of a mobile SoC is a growing problem. At 20nm and 14nm the probability of a chip re-spin due to an error is approaching 50% and we all know how disastrous a re-spin can be, those are not good … Read More


Plotting to take over the time-domain only world

Plotting to take over the time-domain only world
by Don Dingee on 03-16-2013 at 10:00 am

The state machine nature of many digital designs has made time-domain debugging the favorite tool for most designers. We provide a set of inputs, data gets clocked in, and a set of outputs appears. We look for specific patterns in parallel paths, or sequences on serial lines.… Read More


EDAC CEOs: consolidation, clouds, and whether Intel will buy Synopsys

EDAC CEOs: consolidation, clouds, and whether Intel will buy Synopsys
by Paul McLellan on 03-15-2013 at 5:12 pm

Yesterday evening was the annual EDAC CEO forecast meeting. Actually it is not really a forecast meeting any more, more a sort of CEO response to some survey questions asked of EDAC members. Rich Valera of Needham moderated with Lip-Bu, Aart and Wally, along with Simon Segars representing the IP arm(!) of the business and Raul Camposano… Read More


Visual Debugging at Altera on Billion-Transistor Chips

Visual Debugging at Altera on Billion-Transistor Chips
by Daniel Payne on 03-15-2013 at 10:38 am

My first job out of college was doing transistor-level circuit design, so I’m always curious about how companies are doing billion-transistor chip design and debug these days at the FPGA companies.

I spoke with Yaron Kretchmer,he works at Altera and manages the engineering infrastructure group where they have a compute… Read More