Dilbert has always been a favorite comic of mine because it is based on truth and there is no better humor than truth, especially at work. According to Wikipedia; Scott Adams and Dilbert came to national prominence through the downsizing period in 1990s America. A former worker in various roles at big businesses, he became a full-time… Read More
Dimensions of Electronic Design Seminars
ANSYS and Apache are putting on a new series of seminars about designing future electronic systems. These are only getting more complex, of course, cramming more and more functionality into smaller portable devices with good battery life (and not getting too hot), integrating multiple antennas into a single platform, and TSV-based… Read More
Cooley on Synopsys-EVE
John Cooley has an interesting “scoop” on the Synopsys-EVE acquisition. The acquisition itself is not a surprise, it is the one big hole in Synopsys’s product line and EVE is the perfect plug to fill it. It was also about the only thing Cadence has (apart from PCB) that Synopsys does not.
The interesting thing … Read More
Current Embedded Memory Solutions Are Inadequate for 100G Ethernet
With an estimated 7 billion connected devices, the demand for rich content, including video, games, and mobile apps is skyrocketing. Service providers around the globe are scrambling to transform their networks to satisfy the overwhelming demand for content bandwidth. Over the next few years, they will be looking to network… Read More
User Review: iOS 6 on iPad
Much has been written about the new iPhone 5 and iOS 6 in terms of the features, specifications, bill of materials, and chips used in the design. Today I’ll share my experiences of actually using the new iOS 6 on iPad as an EDA blogger.
Upgrading to iOS6
Clicking the On button and noticing that the App Store icon has something new,… Read More
Toshiba’s ReRAM R&D Roadmap
Most companies in the memory business have ReRAM on their radar if not their roadmaps. Toshiba have made some bullish comments about the roadmap and chip size for ReRAM at a recent R&D Strategies Update. At face value, the schedule would put Toshiba quite a bit ahead of their competitors. Over at ReRAM-Forum.com, we have done… Read More
Converge in Detroit
When I worked for VaST we went to a show that I’d never heard of in EDA: SAE Convergence (SAE is the Society of Automotive Engineers). It is held once every two years and it focuses on transportation electronics, primarily automotive although there did seem to be some aerospace stuff there too. This is an even year, Convergence… Read More
How Much Cost Reduction Will 450mm Wafers Provide
I’ve been digging around the Interwebs a bit trying to find out what the received wisdom is about how big a cost reduction can be expected if and when we transition to 450mm (18″) wafers from today’s standard of 300mm (12″). And the answers are totally all over the place. They vary from about a 30% cost reduction… Read More
A Brief History of RTL Design
RTL is an acronym for Register Transfer Level and refers to a level of hardware design abstraction using Registers and logic gates. Here’s an example schematic showing one DFF as a register, and one inverter as a logic gate.
Figure 1: RTL diagram of a DFF (D Flip Flop) and Inverter… Read More
Variation at 28-nm with Solido and GLOBALFOUNDRIES
At DAC 2012 GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Solido presented a user track poster titled “Understanding and Designing for Variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28-nm Technology” (as was previously announced here). This post describes the work that we presented.
We set out to better understand the effects of variation on design at 28-nm. In particular,… Read More
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