I sat down yesterday with Dr. Ajoy Bose, CEO of Atrenta, to get his view of the future of EDA – looking through a high-power “spyglass” of sorts. I first met Ajoy when he was at Software & Technologies. I was then the VP of Engineering for Compass Design Automation and we were considering off-shoring some development. We eventually… Read More



Intel Proves Last Year’s Conventional Wisdom Wrong
Back in the 1990’s, Richard Branson, the legendary Entrepreneur and investor was asked how to become a millionaire, and he allegedly responded, “There’s really nothing to it. Start as a billionaire and then buy an airline.” I think the same principle can be applied to a large part of the Semiconductor… Read More
Synopsys Eats Magma: What Really Happened with Winners and Losers!
Conspiracy theories abound! The inside story of the Synopsys (SNPS) acquisition of Magma (LAVA) brings us back to the 1990’s tech boom with shady investment bankers and pump/dump schemes. After scanning my memory banks and digging around Silicon Valley for skeletons with a backhoe here is what I found out:
The Commission… Read More
Atrenta’s users. Survey says….
Atrenta did an online survey of their users. Of course Atrenta’s users are not necessarily completely representative of the whole marketplace so it is unclear how the results would generalize for the bigger picture, your mileage may vary. About half the people were design engineers, a quarter CAD engineers and the rest … Read More
Challenges in 3D-IC and 2½D Design
3D IC design and what has come to be known as 2½D IC design, with active die on a silicon interposer, require new approaches to verification since the through silicon vias (TSVs) and the fact that several different semiconductor processes may be involved create a new set of design challenges
The power delivery network is a challenge… Read More
Low power techniques
There was recently a forum discussion about the best low power techniques. Not surprisingly we didn’t come up with a new technique nobody had ever thought of but it was an interesting discussion.
First there are the techniques that by now have become standard. If anyone wants more details on these then two good resources are… Read More
eSilicon awards supplier of the year to…
In one of those wonderfully timed coincidences, yesterday eSilicon had their partner appreciation event yesterday. They awarded the 2011 supplier of the year award to…Magma. They have been using Magma tools for almost ten years.… Read More
Driving in the bus lane
Modern microprocessor and memory designs often have hundreds of datapaths that traverse the width of the chip, many of them very wide (over one thousand signals). To meet signal timing and slope targets for these buses, designers must insert repeater cells to improve the speed of the signal. Until now, the operations associated… Read More
Improving Analog/Mixed Signal Circuit Reliability at Advanced Nodes
Preventing electrical circuit failure is a growing concern for IC designers today. Certain types of failures such as electrostatic discharge (ESD) events, have well established best practices and design rules that circuit designers should be following. Other issues have emerged more recently, such as how to check circuits… Read More
How Fast (and accurate) is Your SPICE Circuit Simulator?
In my dad’s generation they tweaked cars to become hotrods while in EDA today we have companies that tweak SPICE circuit simulators to become crowned speed champions. The perennial question though is, “How fast and accurate is my SPICE circuit simulator?”… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot