Today Atrenta and Mentor announced that they were collaborating to enable accurate, signoff quality power estimation at the RTL for entire SoCs. The idea is to facilitate RTL power estimation for designs of over 50M gates running actual software loads over hundreds of millions of cycles, resulting in simulation datasets in the… Read More



Efficient Handling of Timing ECOs
Today, in the design of any type of system on chip (SoC), timing closure is a major problem and it only gets worse with each new, and more advanced process technology. Timing closure is closely inter-leaved with power and clock design. The complexity of achieving closure rises sharply with increasing design density and advancing… Read More
Advanced Verification – HW/SW Emulation – SoC/ASIC Prototyping
Aldec, Inc. is an industry-leading Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company delivering innovative design creation, simulation and verification solutions to assist in the development of complex FPGA, ASIC, SoC and embedded system designs. With an active user community of over 35,000, 50+ global partners, offices worldwide… Read More
Sagantec’s nmigrate adopted and deployed for 14nm technology
Major semiconductor company successfully migrated 28nm libraries to 14nm FinFET
Santa Clara, California – May 29, 2013 – Sagantec announced that its nmigrate tool was adopted by a major semiconductor company for the development of standard cell libraries at 14nm and 16nm FinFET technologies.
This customer already… Read More
The Hot Zone: Do Good While Having Fun
The big 50th Anniversary party for DAC is on Monday night at the home of Austin City Limits. However, you can do good while enjoying yourself and also get into “The Hot Zone”, an exclusive area within the party in the penthouse Jack and Jim Gallery. The Gallery features 30 original photographs from the godfather of music… Read More
BDA Takes on FinFET-based Memories with AFS Mega
Berkeley Design Automation today announced the first silicon-accurate circuit simulation for mega-scale arrays like memories and CMOS image sensors. If this tool lives up to its claims, it is going to be a big deal for FinFET-based circuits, Memory designers are rightly worried about having the accuracy necessary to include… Read More
RTL Signoff Theater
We have talked for years about RTL signoff, the idea that a design could be finalized at the RTL level and then most of the signoff would take place there. Then the design would be passed to a physical implementation team who would not expect to run into any problems (such as routing congestion, missing the power budget or similar problems).… Read More
Transistor, Gate and RTL Debug Update at DAC
Debugging an IC design at the transistor, Gate and RTL levels is often necessary to meet timing requirements and understand analog or digital behavior, yet the process itself can be a tedious one, filled with manual steps, therefore making it an error-prone process. EDA tools have been created to help us graphically debug transistor,… Read More
The never-ending quest to kill metastability
The difficulty of an engineering problem can be gauged by two things:
1) The number of attempts to generate a solution.
2) The degree of hyperbole used to describe the effectiveness of the latest solution.
The problem many folks in the EDA industry are after right now is clock domain crossings (CDCs) and the resulting metastability… Read More
Jasper’s DAC Program
Jasper’s booth is 2346 where you can see demos of the JasperGold Apps and attend seminars on the experiences of ST and Broadcom, and others:
- The Broadcom presentation on making formal an integral part of chip design is Tuesday at 10am.
- The ST presentation on adapting formal methods in ARM subsystems is Monday at 1.30pm and
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?