One new feature at DAC this year is that several of the keynotes are preceded by a ten minute vision of the future from one of the EDA CEOs. Today it was Wally Rhines’s turn. Wally is CEO of Mentor Graphics. He titled his talk Changing the World Through EDA. Since EDA as we know it started in the late 1970s, the number of transistors… Read More





DAC: Gary Smith: Don’t Give Away Your Models
As is now traditional, Gary Smith kicked off DAC proper (there were workshops earlier and some co-located conferences started days before). He started by dismissing the idea that it costs $170M to do an SoC design.
In fact he looked at 3 different cases. Firstly, the completely unconstrained design. Well, no design is completely… Read More
Kaufman Award: Chenming Hu
This year’s Kaufman award winner is Chenming Hu. In contrast to previous years, this was presented on the Sunday evening of DAC instead of at a separate event in San Jose. Chenming’s career was reviewed by Klaus Schuegraf, Group Vice President of EUV Product Development at Cymer, Inc (now part of ASML) and also one of… Read More
The Return of the "Moore Noyce" Company
It has been a little over a fortnight since Paul Otellini officially stepped down from the CEO post and yet it seems to be more than a long time gone. Unlike his predecessors, he was not asked to remain on the board and perhaps it is a sign that his complete disengagement from the company was necessary to complete a future strategic engagement.… Read More
Quality in Design Formats has become a must!
Fractal Technologies is a privately held EDA company with offices in San Carlos, California and Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The company was founded by a small group of highly recognized EDA professionals. The scope of Fractal Technologies is to check consistency and validate all different data formats used in your design and… Read More
The Ugly Stepchild of Physical Verification – Thermal!
Thermal analysis has traditionally been given short shrift when compared to other more prominent issues facing chip designers. Invarian, to my eye at least, feels that the winds of change are in the air. Not that power or EM/IR issues will fade, that indeed is not the case and in fact quite the contrary, they are contributors to the… Read More
ARM @ #50DAC
The 2013 Design Automation Conference celebrates its 50th anniversary Sunday, June 2 through Thursday, June 6 at the Austin Convention Center. DAC is the world’s leading technical conference and trade show on electronic design and design automation. DAC is where the IC Design and EDA ecosystem learns, networks, and does… Read More
RFIC Design Challenges at #50DAC
RFIC developers used to favor mature silicon processes, typically staying back a couple of nodes behind the leading edge. This bought foundries time for ‘RF-enabling’ their PDKs, and also maximized return on investment for developing RF models and infrastructure IP. Not the case any more, it seems. To address the insatiable … Read More
SemiWiki Top 10 Must See @ #50DAC List!
This list was compiled by the SemiWiki bloggers highlighting emerging technologies that we have written about and that will be demonstrated at the Design Automation Conference next week. We highly recommend you investigate them further during your time in Austin and please let us know what you think.
Today SemiWiki has more than… Read More
Robust Reliability Verification: Beyond Traditional Tools and Techniques
Robust Reliability Verification: Beyond Traditional Tools
by Matthew Hogan, Mentor Graphics
At all process nodes, countless hours are diligently expended to ensure that our integrated circuit (IC) designs will function in the way we intended, can be manufactured with satisfactory yields, and are delivered in a timely fashion… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside