Today Oasys announced the availability of Floorplan Compiler in the Oasys RealTime suite of physical RTL exploration and synthesis tools. This is actually a repackaging of a capability that has always been in RealTime Designer, and in fact has been an important aspect of how well RealTime Designer has performed in benchmarks … Read More





Dassault DAC Assault
Dassault Systèmes is not a company entirely new to DAC, but with the acquisition of Matrix One (which had already acquired DesignSync) a few years ago and Tuscany Design Automation’s PinPoint last year they now have a richer portfolio to support various aspects of electronic design. By the way, Dassault is a French company… Read More
Supporting the Customer Is Everyone’s Job
EDA software is quite different from off-the-shelf software. In most cases, customer requirements are unique and depend on the proprietary and complex design process, environments and standards developed and/or evolved by semiconductor design teams over a number of years. EDA software ends up being heavily customized to … Read More
CEO Interview: Jason Xing of ICScape Inc.
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!
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
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
5G – Reality or Fiction
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
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
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?
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
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside