What do nVidia, Freescale and GlobalFoundries have in common? They are semiconductor companies? They are ARM licensees? They are doing 28nm chips? They all have the letter ‘a’ in their names?
All true, but that’s not what I was thinking of. But the letter ‘a’ is a clue since Apache (and Ansys) begin with ‘a’. All three companies have… Read More
Nvidia designs some of the most powerful graphics chips and systems in the world, so I’m always eager to learn more about their IC design methodology. This week I’ve had the chance to talk with Ting Ku, Director of Engineering at Nvidia about his DAC talkin the Apache booth in exactly two weeks from today. Registration… Read More
Mobile devices are taking over the world. If you want lots of graphs and data then look at Mary Meeker’s presentation that I blogged about earlier this week. The graph on the right is just one datapoint, showing that mobile access to the internet is probably up to about 15% now from a standing start 5 years ago.
Of course, one obvious… Read More
Clock gating is one of the most basic weapons in the armoury for reducing dynamic power on a design. All modern synthesis tools can insert clock gating cells to shut down clocking to registers when the contents of the register are not changing. The archetypal case is a register which sometimes loads a new value (when an enable signal… Read More
After a show like DesignConwraps up we get a chance to ask ourself what it all meant, and how was this year different than last year. Reading through many posts about DesignCon I came to discover that the Awards at DesignCon are less contentious than at CES, and also that ANSYSreceived a DesignVision awardfor the 2nd year running. … Read More
DesignConis next week in Santa Clara, so today I spoke with Mark Ravenstahlfrom ANSYS to get an idea of what to expect at the conference and trade show.
In Pune at the start of the month, Norman Chang, Ting-Sheng Ku, Jai Pollayil of Apache/Ansys and NVIDIA presented and ESD check methodologywith Fast Full-chip Static and Macro-level Dynamic Solutions . ESD stands for Elecro-Static Discharge and is basically injecting very high static voltages (think how your hand gets charged… Read More
Late in January it is DesignCon at the Santa Clara convention center from January 28th-31st. Details are here.
On Tuesday from 11.05 to 11.45 Apache and Ansys will be presenting on Thermal Co-analysis of 3D IC/packages/system. This is being presented by a whole team of people: Stephen Pan, senior product specialist at ANSYS; Norman… Read More
The 26th Conference on VLSI Design will be in Pune, India from January 5th to 10th at the Hyatt Regency. Details on the conference here. Registration here. I happened to be involved in the first of these conferences, which was held in Edinburgh where I was wrapping up my PhD. It was in the considerably less palatial surroundings of … Read More
I sat down last week with Paul Traynar who was over from UK. He is Apache’s PowerArtist guru. The first thing we talked about was PowerArtist’s sequential power reduction capabilities.
Forward propagation of enables means that when a register is clock gated and feeds a downstream register then that register can be… Read More
