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How Good is Your Verification?

How Good is Your Verification?
by Paul McLellan on 05-11-2011 at 5:00 am

The traditional way for analyzing the effectiveness of testing in the software world and in the RTL world is code coverage. Make sure that every line of code is executed. This is a pretty crude measure since even 100% code coverage doesn’t mean that all the condition has really been tested but it is certainly necessary–after… Read More


SOC Realization: How Chips Are Really Designed

SOC Realization: How Chips Are Really Designed
by Paul McLellan on 05-09-2011 at 10:00 pm

If you just casually peruse most marketing presentations by EDA companies, you’d come to the conclusion most SoCs are designed from scratch, wrestlilng the monster to the ground with bare hands. But the reality is that most SoCs consist of perhaps 90% IP blocks (many of them memories). That still leaves the remaining 10% … Read More


Cadence EDA360 is Paper!

Cadence EDA360 is Paper!
by Daniel Nenni on 05-08-2011 at 4:02 pm

Hard to believe a year has gone by since the big announcement of the Cadence Blueprint toBattle ‘Profitability Gap’; Counters Semiconductor Industry’s Greatest Threat! Having spent more time on it that I should have, here is my opinion on EDA360 on its first anniversary.

Richard Georing did a very nice anniversary piece “Ten KeyRead More


40nm to 28nm Migration Success Story

40nm to 28nm Migration Success Story
by Paul McLellan on 05-08-2011 at 4:00 pm

The problem:To move dual-port SRAM library and macros from a 40nm process to a 28nm process. In addition to all the changes between two different foundry processes, the 28nm rules are disruptive and incompatible with the previous rules. The memory corecells (foundry-specific) would also need to be completely replaced.

Current… Read More


Intel’s 22nm Process. Atom, ARM, Apple

Intel’s 22nm Process. Atom, ARM, Apple
by Paul McLellan on 05-05-2011 at 9:52 am

Intel had a big press event yesterday at which they announced details of their 22nm process. In a change from their current processes, it goes with a vertical gate. In fact 3 gates which gives them much better control of leakage through transistors that are switched off, along with more transmission through the on transistors. They… Read More


Chip Power Models

Chip Power Models
by Paul McLellan on 05-04-2011 at 4:21 pm

As the complexity of the chip-package-system (CPS) interactions has increased, the tradeoffs in doing a power and noise analysis has had to gradually increase. As is so often the case in semiconductor designs, issues first arise as second-order effects that can largely be ignored but each process node makes the problem worse … Read More


Apache at DAC

Apache at DAC
by Paul McLellan on 05-04-2011 at 2:38 pm

DAC is less than a month away, June 6-8th for the tradeshow, longer depending on what other events you might also be attending. Apache is in booth 2448 (marked in red on the DAC floorplan map.

Many of the presentations at the Apache booth will be customers (such as ARM, Xilinx, ST Ericsson, GlobalFoundries and TSMC) discussing various… Read More


Two New Platforms for Systems Designers

Two New Platforms for Systems Designers
by Daniel Payne on 05-03-2011 at 7:03 pm

Introduction
Today Cadence announced at the Embedded Systems Conference something of interest to systems designers.

What’s New?
The Rapid Prototyping Platform and Virtual System Platform are what’s new, and they intend to enable and automate concurrent hardware and software development. I can remember Mentor… Read More


37 Billion IC with MTP IP from now to 2015: clearly, Kilopass and GlobalFoundries partnership make sense…

37 Billion IC with MTP IP from now to 2015: clearly, Kilopass and GlobalFoundries partnership make sense…
by Eric Esteve on 05-02-2011 at 4:42 am

Although there has been always a strong relationship between Kilopass and Chartered Semiconductor, this relationship has been even enhanced after the acquisition of Chartered by GLOBALFOUNDRIES, allowing Kilopass’s customers to integrate NVM IP on advanced technology nodes, down to 40nm or even 28nm in the near future.







BeforeRead More


Graphical DRC vs Text-based DRC

Graphical DRC vs Text-based DRC
by Daniel Payne on 05-01-2011 at 11:42 am

Introduction
IC designs go through a layout process and then a verification of that layout to determine if the layout layer width and spacing rules conform to a set of manufacturing design rules. Adhering to the layout rules will ensure that your chip has acceptable yields.

At the 28nm node a typical DRC (Design Rule Check) deck will… Read More