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Sentinel-PSI Webinar

Sentinel-PSI Webinar
by Paul McLellan on 08-07-2011 at 3:28 pm

The last of the current series of webinars is on Sentinel-PSI,IC-Package, Power and Signal Integrity Solution. It will be at 11am Pacific time on Thursday 11th August. It will be conducted by Dr. Tao Su, product manager of the Sentinel products. Dr. Su has many years of experience in the EDA industry and is specialized in power integrity… Read More


Apple Roadmaps Intel to 14nm

Apple Roadmaps Intel to 14nm
by Ed McKernan on 08-07-2011 at 1:11 pm

Intel will not win the tablet market with any of the various Atom chips rolling out at 32nm, 22nm and even 14nm. They are too late to a game that Apple owns 90% of today and will so in the future. All of these ultra low power atom versions are like the Saturn test rocket developments that preceded the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. They are necessary… Read More


Yalta in EDA: Cadence stronger in VIP territory…

Yalta in EDA: Cadence stronger in VIP territory…
by Eric Esteve on 08-07-2011 at 5:42 am

…when Synopsys is getting the lion’s share in Interface IP. In Q2 2010, there was two major acquisitions in EDA world: Synopsys has bought Virage Logic (for more than $300M) when Cadence bought Denali for an equivalent amount. Synopsys bought a 100% IP focused company, when Cadence bought a strongly VIP focused company. Does it … Read More


August 11th – Hands-on Workshop with Calibre: DRC, LVS, DFM, xRC, ERC

August 11th – Hands-on Workshop with Calibre: DRC, LVS, DFM, xRC, ERC
by Daniel Payne on 08-06-2011 at 9:29 pm

I’ve blogged about the Calibre family of IC design tools before:

Smart Fill replaced Dummy Fill Approach in a DFM Flow
DRC Wiki
Graphical DRC vs Text-based DRC
Getting Real time Calibre DRC Results with Custom IC Editing
Transistor-level Electrical Rule Checking
Who Needs a 3D Field Solver for IC Design?
Prevention is BetterRead More


SNUG outside Silicon Valley

SNUG outside Silicon Valley
by Paul McLellan on 08-05-2011 at 6:04 pm

SNUG in Silicon Valley was in March so either you were there or you’ve missed it. But it is the summer (and fall) of SNUG in the rest of the world:

SNUG China (in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen) on August 22nd-30th
SNUG Singapore on August 23rd
SNUG Taiwan (in Hsinchu) on August 25-26th
SNUG Japan (in Tokyo) on September 7th
SNUG … Read More


Assertion-based Formal Verification

Assertion-based Formal Verification
by Paul McLellan on 08-05-2011 at 5:34 pm

Formal verification has grown in importance as designs have grown and it has become necessary to face up to the theoretical impossibility of using simulation to get complete coverage along with the practical impossibility of simulating enough to even get close.

There are a number of solvers for what is called satisfiability (SAT)… Read More


Chip-Package-System Webinar

Chip-Package-System Webinar
by Paul McLellan on 08-05-2011 at 5:14 pm

The webinar on CPS (chip-package-system) is on Tuesday 9th August at 11am Pacific time. It will be conducted by Christopher Ortiz, Principal Application Engineer at Apache Design Solutions. Dr. Ortiz has been with Apache since 2007, supporting the Sentinel product line. Prior to Apache he worked at Agere / LSI, where he investigated… Read More


IC Power Dissipation in…the New York Times!

IC Power Dissipation in…the New York Times!
by Paul McLellan on 08-05-2011 at 4:37 pm

Generally if you want to read about power dissipation in SoCs and the potential impact on limiting how much computer power we might be able to cram onto a given piece of silicon then EE Times is a good place to look. But last weekend there was a full-length article in, of all places a different Times, the New York Times, entitled ProgressRead More


Apple Strength Will Compel ARM to Trim its Sails

Apple Strength Will Compel ARM to Trim its Sails
by Ed McKernan on 08-03-2011 at 7:00 pm

ARM’s move into the broad Tablet and PC space is based on lining up as many partners as possible to attack Intel from multiple angles. It’s a strategy not so different from what Intel employed in the early PC days. However, the strategy is unraveling as Apple and Samsung have reached market share domination without ARM’s merchant… Read More


Apple makes 2/3 of profits of entire mobile industry

Apple makes 2/3 of profits of entire mobile industry
by Paul McLellan on 08-02-2011 at 5:41 pm

This is an amazing picture (click to enlarge). Apple now makes 2/3 of all the profit in the entire mobile handset industry. And that is the entire handset industry, not just smartphones where it has also blown past Nokia to become number one (although there are more Android handsets than iOS, those handsets are spread across multiple… Read More