You are currently viewing SemiWiki as a guest which gives you limited access to the site. To view blog comments and experience other SemiWiki features you must be a registered member. Registration is fast, simple, and absolutely free so please,
join our community today!
Intro
Mentor, Cadence and Synopsys all offer Verilog simulators, however when was the last time that you benchmarked your simulator against a tool from a smaller company?
I just heard from an RTL designer (who wants to remain anonymous) about his experience comparing a Verilog simulator called CVC from Tachyon against ModelSim… Read More
Apple’s Supply Chainby Paul McLellan on 09-21-2011 at 5:48 pmCategories: General
I am doing some consulting right now for a company that shall remain nameless, and one of the things I have had to look at is Apple’s supply chain. I came across an interesting article by someone with the goal to “buy a MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple.” He is in the UK and doesn’t like Apple’s… Read More
It is no secret that custom ICs are getting larger and more complex and this has driven chip design teams to split up into smaller teams to handle the manual or semi-automated routing of the many blocks and hierarchical layers that go to make up such a design. These sub-teams don’t just need to handle the routing within their own block(s)… Read More
Over the years there has been a lot of standard creation in the IC design world to allow interoperability of tools from different vendors. One area of recent interest is interoperable constraints for custom IC design. Increasingly, analog design layout is becoming more automated. Advanced process nodes require trial layouts… Read More
Coby Hanoch joins Jasperby Paul McLellan on 09-20-2011 at 7:00 amCategories: EDA
Jasper has hired Coby Hanoch as the VP of international sales to manage sales outside of North America. I talked to him last week.
Coby started his career after graduation from the Israeli Institute of Technology as an engineer at National Semiconductor. He quickly ended up in verification where they developed the first random … Read More
As analog and mixed-signal designers move to very advanced geometries, they must grapple with more and more complex considerations of the silicon. Not only do nanometer CMOS devices have limitations in terms of analog-relevant characteristics such gain and noise performance, but they also introduce new sources of variation… Read More
AMS design flows can follow a traditional path or consider trying something new. The traditional path goes along the following steps:
[LIST=1]
Design requirements
Try a transistor-level schematic
Run circuit simulation
Compare the simulated results versus the requirements, re-size the transistors and go back to step 3 or …
Read More
On Sept 22, 2011, the nm Circuit Verification Forumwill be held in Silicon Valley, hosted by Berkeley Design Automation. At this forum, Trent McConaghy of Solido DA will present a case study on the TSMC Reference Flow 2.0 VCO circuit, to showcase Fast PVT in the steps of extracting PVT corners, verifying PVT, and doing post-layout… Read More
Fast Track Seminarsby Paul McLellan on 09-15-2011 at 6:11 pmCategories: EDA
Atrenta’s SoC realization seminars, “Fast Track Your SoC Design” have started.The first one was in Ottowa last Tuesday, and it was a full house. In a straw poll, most of the attendees acknowledged facing IP handoff and quality issues. The keynote speaker was Dr Yuejian Wu, director of ASIC development at Infinera… Read More
Earlier in the week I met with Phil Bishop, who is the corporate VP of worldwide marketing at Magma.
I started by asking him where he came from. He originally started as a designer at Motorola in microprocessors and microcontrollers. Then he moved to Silicon Compiler Systems (remember them?) who ended up being acquired by Mentor.… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot