It was back in 1991 that Cadence first announced the Virtuoso product name, and here we are 32 years later and the product is alive and doing quite well. Steven Lewis from Cadence gave me an update on something new that they call Virtuoso Studio, and it’s all about custom IC design for the real world. In those 32 years we’ve… Read More
Freemium is the two words “free” and “premium” combined together, and many of us have enjoyed using freemium apps on our phones, tablets and desktop devices over the years. The concept is quite simple, you find an app that is useful, and download the free version, mostly to see if it operates as advertised,… Read More
There are certain tasks that have been the holy grail of EDA for some time. A real silicon compiler – high level language as input and an optimal, correct layout as output is one. Fully automated analog design – objectives as input, optimal circuit as output is another. With the increased layout times, due to the ever-increasing design… Read More
HCL Technologies is a large, well-established multi-national company with an annual revenue of around $10B and worldwide employee count of well over 150K. They provide valuable solutions to about 20 different industries and related market segments. Over the years, I have had first hand insights to their semiconductor design… Read More
HCL VersionVault is a secure enterprise solution for version control and configuration management. With HCL VersionVault – Cadence Virtuoso Integration, VersionVault brings its enterprise configuration management capabilities to analog and mixed signal designers. This integration enables designers to take advantage… Read More
Electromagnetic (EM) simulations have been performed on die metal structures since the 1990s. Originally, the analysis was restricted to a single device (e.g., a spiral inductor). The number of on-die devices simulated simultaneously grew with the increasing capabilities of the computers performing the computations. This… Read More
The Cadence Virtuoso Design System has been one of the premier Integrated Circuit design systems for many years and is used by most major semiconductor companies. While it is powerful and versatile, it is often not optimized for certain complex, repetitive and time-consuming layout design tasks.
The founder and president … Read More
Cadence Virtuoso is by far the most popular layout tool for IC design. This is especially true at advanced process nodes. In my opinion one of the key reasons for this is its built-in extension language, SKILL. SKILL is a powerful tool to add time saving and customized functionality to the Virtuoso layout editor. For analog and custom… Read More
Pengwei Qian is the founder and CEO of SkillCAD, a grassroots EDA company that has amassed the most impressive customer list (60+ companies) I have experienced for a company of this size, absolutely.
Pengwei has a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and a Masters in Material Science from Fudan University and a Masters in Electronic Engineering… Read More
