Digital IC design has been largely automated with high-level languages, RTL coding, logic synthesis, and automated place and route tools. What about analog IC layout automation, is it possible? A few EDA companies think that it is possible and even practical. In recent memory there were two companies really focused on analog … Read More
On March 12 SEMI held a New England Forum breakfast event entitled “Wafers to Wallstreet” with four speakers. The main focus of the discussion was on the “Internet of Things” and the following are my impression from the talks in a bullet point format.
Device Scaling and Performance in the Era of IoT – Gary Rosen, Applied Materials… Read More
Advanced skill in auto repair, carpentry, plumbing, and similar trades often correlates to one factor. Knowing what you want to do is one thing – having the proper tool is another, and can make the difference. Many a job has extended from minutes to hours over the lack of the right tool at the right moment. Experienced mechanics and… Read More
Digital designers are more numerous than analog IC designers, and so they tend to get more attention from EDA vendors in terms of tools and automation methodologies. For an analog design team with specialists focused separately on schematics and layout there are several methodology questions that need to be addressed, like:… Read More
Ad hoc digital design verification approaches ran out of steam at least a decade ago when designs got intractably large to make it feasible to keep track of everything with pen and paper and excel. But analog design has remained largely ad hoc to this day. The designer runs spice, looks at the waveforms that come out and decide whether… Read More
My engineering background includes designing at the transistor-level, so I was drawn to attend a webinar today presented by Tanner EDAand Incentia about Adding a Digital Block to an Analog Design. Many of the 30,000 users of Tanner tools have been doing AMS designs, so adding logic synthesis and static timing analysis from Incentia… Read More
Yesterday was Cadence’s annual mixed-signal technology forum. I think that there was a definite theme running through many of the presentations, namely that wireless communication of one kind or another is on a sharp rise with more and more devices needing to connect to WiFi, Bluetooth and so on. This was most obvious during… Read More
When I upgraded cars from a 1988 to 1998 Acura it seemed like my car had become much smarter with a security chip in the key, security codes in the radio and a connector for computer diagnosis, however in today’s modern auto there’s a lot more mixed-signal design content. Micronasand Synopsysgot together and hosted … Read More
In the race to reduce verification time for ever growing sizes of SoCs, various techniques are being adopted at different levels in the design chain, functional verification being of utmost priority. In an analog-digital mixed design, which is the case with most of the SoCs, the Spice simulation of analog components is the limiting… Read More
In recent days I’ve seen several long discussions about Texas Instrumentslosing its grip in semiconductor industry when it came out of a business it was strong in, i.e. wireless business. It seems the semiconductor community has not digested the fact that TI, very rightly, came out of the OMAP business at the right time. The smartphone… Read More
