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Apache Design Solutions today filed their S-1 with the SEC in preparation for its initial public offering (IPO). This is a big deal since there hasn’t been an IPO of an EDA company for may years (Magma was the last 10 years ago). As a private company they have not had to reveal their financials until now.
It turns out that they did… Read More
With each process generation, the design rules get more and more complex. One datapoint: there are twice as many checks at 28nm as there are at 90nm. In fact, the complexity of the rules is outpacing the ability to describe them using the simplified approaches used in the DRCs built-into layout editors or formats like LEF.
Worse still,… Read More
The semiconductor design and manufacturing challenges at 40nm and 28nm are a direct result ofMoore’s Law, the climbing transistor count and shrinking geometries. It’s a process AND design issue and the interaction is at the transistor level. Transistors may be shrinking, but atoms aren’t. So now it actually matters when even… Read More
Last week I met with Joseph Davis, Ph.D. at Mentor Graphics in Wilsonville, Oregon to learn about a new product designed for full-custom IC layout designers to improve productivity.
The traditional flow for full-custom IC layout designers has been nearly unchanged for decades:
- Read a schematic or use Schematic Driven Layout
…
Read More
…but what is the weight of the Verification IP market?
If the IP market is a niche market (see: **) with revenue of about 1% of the overall semiconductor business, how could we qualify the VIP market? Ultra-niche market? But the verification of the IP integrated into the SoC is an essential piece of the engineering puzzle when you are… Read More
There has been a lot of press this past week surrounding the release of iPad2. While it has some significant improvements, they are, for the most part, incremental. In my view the lack of flash, a USB port and a memory card slot continue to be huge deficits. Until this past week my reservations about the iPad have been mostly theoretical,… Read More
The 17[SUP]th[/SUP] Annual TSMC Technology Symposium will be held in San Jose California on April 5[SUP]th[/SUP], 2011. Dr. Morris Chang will again be the keynote speaker. The theme this year is “Trusted Technology and Capacity Provider”and I think it’s important to not only hear what people are saying but also understand why… Read More
One of the challenges with verifying today’s large chips is deciding which signals to record during simulation so that you can work out the root cause when you detect something anomalous in the results. If you record too few signals, then you risk having to re-run the entire simulation when you omitted to record a signal that… Read More
This is just another blog about Carl Icahn and his quest to conquer EDA, when in fact EDA is conquering him. It includes highlights from my dinner with Mentor Graphics and Physicist Brian Greene, the Mentor Q4 conference call, and meeting Mentor CEO Wally Rhines at DvCon 2011.
It wasn’t just the free food this time, dinner with Brian… Read More
Yesterday I talked to Shaker Sarwary, the senior product director for Atrenta’s clock-domain crossing (CDC) product SpyGlass-CDC. I asked him how it came about. The product was originally started nearly 8 years ago, around the time Atrenta itself got going. Shaker got involved about 5 years ago.
Originally this was a small… Read More
If you believe in Hobbits you can believe in Rapidus