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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


Has IP moved to Subsystem? Will IP-SoC 2011 bring answers?

Has IP moved to Subsystem? Will IP-SoC 2011 bring answers?
by Eric Esteve on 08-02-2011 at 11:21 am

I have shared with you the most interesting I have heard during IP-SoC 2010, in two blogs, Part I was about IP market forecast(apparently my optimistic view was quite different from the rather pessimistic vision shared by SC analysts) and Part II, named “System Level Mantra”, was strongly influenced by Cadence clever presentation,… Read More


PathFinder webinar: Full-chip ESD Integrity and Macro-level Dynamic ESD

PathFinder webinar: Full-chip ESD Integrity and Macro-level Dynamic ESD
by Paul McLellan on 08-01-2011 at 10:00 am

The PathFinder webinar will be at 11am Pacific time on Thursday 4th August. It will be conducted by Karthik Srinivasan, Senior Applications Engineer at Apache Design Solutions. Mr. Srinivasan has over four years of experience in the EDA industry, focusing on die, system, and cross-domain analysis. His professional interests… Read More


MCU Performance Customers: The Cavalry is Coming Over The Hill

MCU Performance Customers: The Cavalry is Coming Over The Hill
by Ed McKernan on 07-31-2011 at 7:30 pm

cavalry lg

The under the radar, sleepy microcontroller market is about to undergo a rapid transformation the next several years with new entrants and the rise of 32 bit cores that will redefine the parameters for success. This will revive growth and result in new winners and losers. But lots of questions remain.

My first job out of college in… Read More


Smart Fill Replaces Dummy Fill Approach in a DFM Flow

Smart Fill Replaces Dummy Fill Approach in a DFM Flow
by Daniel Payne on 07-30-2011 at 7:11 pm

I met with Jeff Wilson, Product Marketing Manager at Mentor in the Calibre product group to learn more about Smart Fill versus Dummy Fill for DFM flows. Jeff works in the Wilsonville, Oregon office and we first meet at Silicon Compilers back in the 1990’s.

Dummy Fill

This diagram shows an IC layout layer on the left as originallyRead More