Many years ago, digital and analog design flows diverged, with digital design benefiting from increasing levels of automation and more importantly separation between the front-end design process and the back-end design process. While digital design still requires linkages between the front and back end, they are well defined… Read More
Pulsic recently announced its new “freemium” product Animate Preview and we had the chance to chat with Mark Williams, President and CEO of Pulsic. Mark explained details of the product and the new business model that could change the direction of the traditional EDA business model structure.
What brought you to the semiconductor… Read More
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting at lunch with good friend Scott Santandrea, explaining my struggles to get traction with the sales channel for the Analog to Digital Converter product line I was managing. My business line had been spending a lot of resources developing high-performance 24-bit delta sigma and 20-bit
Despite the large role of place and route in IC design, there will always be a need for custom layout design. This is particularly true in radio frequency (RF), power management (PM) and power amplifier (PA) circuits, among others. Cadence Virtuoso is by far the leading tool for creating these custom designs. Virtuoso has a sophisticated… Read More
Mixed signal simulation is a very hot topic these days. In modern designs, it is harder to draw a line between the analog and digital and work with them independently. Analog blocks are showing up everywhere. Even in what would have qualified as a digital design a few years ago, now designers need to look at things like PLLs, IOs and … Read More
Transistor-level design for full-custom and analog circuits has long been a way for IC design companies to get the absolute best performance out of silicon and keep ahead of the competition. One challenge to circuit designers is meeting all of the specs across all Process, Voltage and Temperature (PVT) corners, so that silicon… Read More
Once in a while I like to write on a fun, off-beat topic. My muse today is analog computing, a domain that some of us antiques in the industry recall with fondness, though sadly in my case without hands-on experience. Analog computers exploit the continuous nature of analog signals together with a variety of transforms to represent… Read More
Power integrity and reliability are just as important for AMS designs as they are for digital designs. Ansys is offering a series of five webinars on this topic, under a heading they call ANSYS in ACTION, a bi-weekly demo series from ANSYS in which an application engineer shows you how simulation can address common applications.… Read More
Most people think that designing successful high speed analog circuits requires a mixture of magic, skill and lots of hard work. While this might be true, in reality it also requires a large dose of collaboration among each of the members of the design, tool and fabrication panoply. This point was recently made abundantly clear … Read More
In my 34 years in IC and EDA, it never ceases to amaze me as to how ingenious designers can be with what is given them. Mentor, a Siemens business, has released a wonderful white paper that is proof of this yet again. The white paper steps through how one of their customers, MEMSIC, used the Tanner tool suite to develop a combination CMOS… Read More
