Black Swan Events are not to be embraced, they are to be feared, if conventional wisdom holds true. And yet, the 2011 Black Swan that slammed the PC market (i.e. the Thailand Floods that wiped out a large part of the disk drive market) has turned out to be the key catalyst for reshaping the semiconductor industry in 2012 and 2013. Instead… Read More
Fast Monte Carlo from Infiniscale at DAC
Firas Mohamed, President and CEO (Ph.D.) of Infiniscale met with me on Monday at DAC to provide an overview of what EDA software they offer to IC designers at the transistor-level.
Vision – analog flow that Monte Carlo simulation is required, which is thousands of circuit simulations, however the higher the sigma the more… Read More
IC Layout Tools from Japan at DAC
Last Monday I met with Nobuto Ono, VP Business development at Jedat (Japan EDA Technologies) while attending the DAC conference.
The company started in Tokyo and is Ex Seiko Instruments, in 2004.
Main product – layout editor for IC (SX 9000). New system is ALpha SX in 2002. 2007 listed on JASDAQ market. Like Virtuoso tools,… Read More
TSMC Theater Presentation: Atrenta SpyGlass!
Atrenta presented an update on the TSMC Soft IP Alliance Program at TSMC’s theater each day at DAC. Mike Gianfagna, Atrenta VP of Marketing, presented an introduction to SpyGlass, an overview of the program and a progress report. Dan Kochpatcharin, TSMC Deputy Director of IP Portfolio, was also there. Between Mike, Dan, and I there… Read More
Carbonize your Imagination
Just up the road from Cambridge-based ARM in Kings Langley is Imagination Technologies, their biggest competitor in the GPU market. Interestingly they also were a customer of VLSI Technology in the early days back when they were called Videologic. Tomorrow, jointly with Carbon, they are announcing that a wide range of their PowerVR,… Read More
How to Use Those Licenses Effectively
So DAC is over and you are no longer thinking about the features and benefits of new tools or even the tools that you already own. But once you have lots of tools then you need to worry about how to use them efficiently.
But here are three things that you need to worry about to get the most out of your EDA investment:
- how do you measure the actual
Jasper’s Kathryn Kranen Elected EDAC Chairman
Kathryn Kranen, CEO of Jasper was elected chairman of EDAC for 2012-2014. She has has 20 years EDA industry. She started her career as a design engineer at Rockwell International and then joined Daisy Systems (one of the DMV, the second generation of EDA companies). She then moved to be VP of North American sales at Quickturn (emulation)… Read More
BDA TSMC Theater Presentation
I caught the Berkeley Design Automation presentation in the TSMC Theater, where Simon Young (BDA’s director of product marketing) described the Analog FastSPICE (AFS) nanometer circuit verification platform, built on their foundation of very fast, very accurate, high capacity circuit simulation.
BDA claims the AFS platform… Read More
Ausdia’s Timevision
I met Sam Appleton of Ausdia during DAC. I found it quite hard to understand exactly what they do. I’ve talked before about something that I nick-named City Slickers’ Marketing. It is named after the following exchange from the movie City Slickers:Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? [holds up one finger] This.… Read More
One Billion Transistor IC Layout Editing
There are only a handful of billion transistor IC designs in existence today, so when an EDA company touts 1 trillion transistor IC layout editing then I take notice. This year at DAC I met with Katherine Hayes and Karen Mangum of Micro Magic to get an update on their IC layout tools.… Read More
Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding is Here