You may have noticed that I have been writing a lot more about analog design lately. This is no accident. Analog and custom blocks are increasingly important because of the critical role they play in enabling many classes of systems, such as automotive, networking, wireless, mobile, cloud, etc. Many of the SoCs needed for these… Read More
Murilo Pilon Pessatti is an Electrical Engineer with a MSEE in Analog IC design. He studied in Brazil at São Paulo University (USP) and earned a masters at Campinas State University (UNICAMP). Murilo then moved to Lisbon in Europe to work for ChipIdea, in the early 2000’s when the smartphone era was just taking off.
“I… Read More
There is an old saying popularized by Mark Twain that goes “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It turns out that no one can say who originated this saying, yet despite however you might feel about statistics, they play an important role in verifying analog designs. The truth is that there are large numbers… Read More
In September, ClioSoft gave a SemiWiki webinar titled, Reusing Your IPs & PDKs Successfully With Cadence® Virtuoso®. I was happy to be the moderator of this webinar, having had the chance to work with ClioSoft’s team over many years. The webinar was informative while also being very time efficient. I think it is important for… Read More
I recently wrote about a ClioSoft® study with Google on using cloud platforms for EDA design and the importance of using persistent storage when doing that. ClioSoft will again be sharing important information on design productivity in the upcoming webinar, Reusing Your IPs & PDKs Successfully With Cadence® Virtuoso®. … Read More
The letters “PVT” roll of the tongue easily enough, belying the complexity that variations in process, temperature and voltage can cause for analog designs. For semiconductor processes, there are dozens of parameters that can affect the viability of a design. It would be easy enough to optimize a circuit with only one or two varying… Read More
Intento Design builds responsive analog EDA. The ID-Xplore tool is used for analog design acceleration and technology porting at the functional level, helping companies move analog IP quickly between technology nodes and across business units. The Intention view is a simple, elegant, and powerful concept that gives the speed… Read More
Optimizing analog designs has always been a difficult and tricky process. Designing for IoT applications has only made this more difficult with the added importance of minimizing power. Unlike other circuit parameters, it is not easy to specify power as a design goal when using equations. Power is a resultant property and must… Read More
Well it comes as no surprise to those that use and design them, that PLL’s are a world unto themselves and very complicated indeed. With PLL’s we are talking about analog designs that rely on ring oscillators or LC tanks. They are needed on legacy nodes, like the ones that IoT chips are based on, and they are crucial for high speed advanced… Read More
Analog IP is more difficult to design and optimize for a given process node compared to digital IP, so any automation for analog designers is always welcome. The engineers at SMIC in China have customers that design analog IP and often they need to know how to optimize it for a specific process, so I watched a presentation by Josh Yang,… Read More
