I already talked about how Cadence is splitting Virtuoso into two. Anyway, it is now officially announced. The 6.1 version will continue to be developed as a sort of Virtuoso classic for people doing designs off the bleeding edge that don’t require the new features. And a new Virtuoso 12.1 intended for people doing 20nm and… Read More





Mentor Snags Two Awards at DesignCon
Oh, awards season! The glitz! The glamour! The most important and innovative new design products!
That last part is a key feature of the annual DesignVision awards and the Best in Test awards presented at DesignCon 2013. Mentor Graphics’ test products scored two wins: a DesignVision award for their new Tessent IJTAG product, and… Read More
Improving Methodology the NVIDIA Way
I was at DesignCon in Santa Clara today and listened to Jonah Alben of NVIDIA’s keynote on what their approach is to improving design methodology. He started by pointing out that most companies underinvest in EDA (and he includes NVIDIA in this). Partially it is complaceny: that last chip taped out so we know we can do it again.… Read More
Get the Latest Info on DFM at the SPIE Litho Conference
While the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference is best known for IC manufacturing, computational lithography, mask preparation and other back-end topics, there is also a significant amount of interest in Design for Manufacturing (DFM) at the conference because some litho issues are best (or only) addressed by modifying the… Read More
Design team in China also lead Network-on-Chip adoption…
I have mentioned NoC adoption explosion during the last two years, illustrated by the huge growth in revenue of a company like Arteris: if we consider only revenue coming from upfront license sales (not including royalties), Arteris growth has been geometric between 2011 and 2010, passing from 18 to 39 customers, which is more … Read More
A Brief History of Tanner EDA
While founder John Tanner, PhD, got his initial exposure to the TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook as an undergraduate, it was his experience as a Caltech graduate student that forged his early path in EDA. In 1979, while enrolled in a VLSI design course at Caltech, John and his classmates received a pre-print of Carver Mead’s seminal… Read More
Time in a model: xtUML and concurrency
Most embedded programming strategies involve decomposing the embedded application into chunks, which can then be executed as independent tasks. More advanced applications involve some type of data flow, and may attempt to execute operations in parallel where possible.… Read More
Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor on FinFETs
In my opinion, FinFETs will be the most significant piece of technology we, as semiconductor ecosystem people, will experience this decade. Seriously this is exciting stuff and one of the top search terms on SemiWiki for 6 months running. Here is a quick peek at what the top EDA companies will be talking about at the Common Platform… Read More
How GLOBALFOUNDRIES is Differentiating in 2013
GLOBALFOUNDRIES changed the landscape of the foundry business in 2009 with a simple but ambitious plan to become the world’s first truly global foundry. At the Common Platform Technology Forum February 5th in the Santa Clara Convention Center GF Executive Vice President Michael Noonen will give an update on how that is … Read More
High Performance or Cycle Accuracy? You can have both
SoC designers have always wanted to simulate hardware and software together during new product development, so one practical question has been how to trade off performance versus accuracy when creating an early model of the hardware. The creative minds at Carbon Design Systems and ARM have combined to offer us some hope and relief… Read More
Intel’s Path to Technological Leadership: Transforming Foundry Services and Embracing AI