I LOVE DAC is back. This year the sponsors are Atrenta, Jasper and Forte (hey, all semiwiki subscribers). The way it works is that you register on the DAC website here and you get a free three-day exhibit pass. In addition to everything going on in the exhibit hall, including the pavilion panels held there, the pass also gives access… Read More


Wally Rhines: Embedded Software the Next Revolution?
As seems to be traditional, Wally Rhines gave a keynote here at the GlobalPress Electronics Summit here in sunny Santa Cruz. It was entitled Embedded Software, the Next Revolution in EDA. Unlike Cadence and Synopsys, Mentor has a strong position in embedded software. It has been build up over a long time through a series of acquisitions… Read More
Cavendish Kinetics
I have spent the last couple of days at the GlobalPress Electronics Summit at the Chaminade Resort in Santa Cruz. Hey, it’s tough, but someone has to do it. One interesting presentation was from Cavendish Kinetics. It is especially interesting because many years ago Cavendish was founded by Mike Beunder, who I know well since… Read More
FinFETs: Ask the Experts II!
As I have mentioned 28 times already, on Friday (April 19[SUP]th[/SUP]) I will be keynoting FinFET day at the EDPS conference in Monterey. This is an excellent opportunity to ask the experts about the challenges of FinFET design and manufacturing in an intimate setting (60 people). If you are interested register today and use the… Read More
Xilinx: Hide the RTL
Tom Feist of Xilinx presented here at the GlobalPress Electronics Summit about their strategy to take design abstraction up another level. In the SoC world, we are still pretty much stuck at the RTL level and have moved to higher abstractions by using an IP strategy. But at least all IC designers are RTL-literate.
Xilinx, in the Vivado… Read More
Altera, Intel, TSMC, ARM: the Plot Thickens
Vince Hu of Altera presented us her at the GlobalPress Electronics Summit on their process roadmap. Since just a month or two ago they announced that Intel would be their foundry at 14nm, everyone wanted to get a better idea of what was really going on.
At 28nm, Altera use 2 processes, TSMC 28HP (for high end Stratix-5 devices) and TSMC… Read More
Webinar: Making a Simple, Structured and Efficient VHDL Testbench
Most simple testbenches have close to no structure, are terrible to modify and hopeless to understand. They often take far too much time to implement and provide close to no support when debugging potential problems. This webinar will demonstrate how to build a far better testbench with respect to all these issues – in significantly… Read More
Variation-aware IC Design
We’ve blogged before about Layout Dependent Effects (LDE) on SemiWiki and how it further complicates the IC design and layout process, especially at 28nm and lower nodes because the IC layout starts to change the MOS device performance. There’s an interesting webinarfrom Cadence on Variation-aware IC Design, … Read More
Chasing DP Rabbits
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
The use of stitching can greatly reduce the number of double patterning (DP) decomposition violations that a designer has to resolve.… Read More
Two New TSMC-Cadence Webinars for Advanced Node Design
Foundries and EDA vendors are cooperating at increasing levels of technical intimacy as we head to the 20nm and lower nodes. Cadence has a strong position in the EDA tools used for IC design and layout of custom and AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal) designs. They have created a series of webinars to highlight the design challenges and new… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki