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
The semiconductor industry is expected to grow at a reasonable pace in 2015 and beyond, with the biggest market being compute applications followed by wireless and consumer applications. The highest growth, however, is expected to be in application-specific products for devices such as smartphones, wearables, memories, … Read More
In a world where Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Application Specific Standard Products (ASSPs) are dominating every conceivable application, greater attention is being applied to their long term reliability. These chips are being built on smaller lithographies, running at higher speeds, dissipating… Read More
Most analog cells have a power off mode intended to reduce power consumption. In this mode, all the circuit branches between the supply lines are set in a high impedance mode by driving MOS gates to a blocking voltage. This is a somewhat similar situation to that in tri-state digital circuits.
When a branch is set in that high impedance… Read More
Designing an SoC requires a team, and the engineers typically use lots of specialized EDA software and semiconductor IP to get the job done. Many have started to ask about how designing a chip is different than designing and managing a large software project, or how is analog design different than digital design in terms of managing… Read More
