Jasper’s Annual User Group Meeting is on November 9th and 10th, in Cupertino California. It will feature users from all over the world sharing the best practices in verification. If you are a user of Jasper’s products then you should definitely plan to attend. This year there is so much good material that the meeting… Read More




Testing, testing… 3D ICs
3D ICs complicate silicon testing, but solutions exist now to many of the key challenges. – by Stephen Pateras
The next phase of semiconductor designs will see the adoption of 3D IC packages, vertical stacks of multiple bare die connected directly though the silicon. Through-silicon vias (TSV) result in shorter and thinner… Read More
Circuit Simulation and Ultra low-power IC Design at Toumaz
I read about how Toumaz used the Analog Fast SPICE (AFS) tool from BDA and it sounded interesting so I setup a Skype call with Alan Wong in the UK last month to find out how they design their ultra low-power IC chips.
Interview
Q: Tell me about your IC design background.
A: I’ve been at Toumaz almost 8 years now and before that at Sony… Read More
SuperSpeed USB finally take off! Synopsys claim over 40 USB 3.0 IP sales…
SuperSpeed USB specification was released in November 2008! Even if we can see USB 3.0 powered peripherals shipping now, essentially external HDD, connected to PC equipped with Host Bus Adaptors (as PC chipset from Intel or AMD were not supporting USB 3.0), it will take up to the second quarter of 2012 before PC will be shipped with… Read More
SoC Realization: Let’s Get Physical!
If you ask design groups what the biggest challenges are to getting a chip out on time, then the top two are usually verification, and getting closure after physical design. Not just timing closure, but power and area. One of the big drivers of this is predicting and avoiding excessive routing congestion, which is something that … Read More
Amazon’s Kindle Fire Spells Trouble for nVidia, Qualcomm and Intel
With the introduction of the Kindle Fire, it is now guaranteed that Amazon has the formula down for building the new, high volume mobile platform based on sub $9 processors. In measured fashion, Amazon has moved down Moore’s Law curve from the initial 90nm Freescale processor to what is reported to be TI’s OMAP 4 in order to add the … Read More
AMS Verification: Speed versus Accuracy
I spent Thursday Sept. 22 at the first nanometer Circuit Verification Forum, held at TechMart in Santa Clara. Hosted by Berkeley Design Automation (BDA), the forum was attended by 100+ people, with circuit designers dominating. I spoke with many attendees. They were seeking solutions to the hugely challenging problems they … Read More
Verdi: there’s an App for that
Verdi is very widely used in verification groups, perhaps the industry’s most popular debug system. But users have not been able to access the Verdi environment to write their own scripts or applications. This means either that they are prevented from doing something that they want to do, or else the barrier for doing it is… Read More
Making Money With Cramer? Don’t Count on it!
Investing with Cramer is a crap shoot. By Cramer, I mean the Mad Money TV show, and Action Alerts PLUS from thestreet.com. Cramer is certainly a smart guy and knows his stuff, but don’t think following his investment strategy is necessarily a winner. He constantly maintains that you can beat the averages by picking individual… Read More
Memory Cell Characterization with a Fast 3D Field Solver
Memory designers need to predict the timing, current and power of their designs with high accuracy before tape-out to ensure that all the design goals will be met. Extracting the parasitic values from the IC layout and then running circuit simulation is a trusted methodology however the accuracy of the results ultimately depend… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography