The Intention View: Disruptive Innovation for Analog Design

The Intention View: Disruptive Innovation for Analog Design
by Daniel Nenni on 04-20-2018 at 7:00 am

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


Enabling A Data Driven Economy

Enabling A Data Driven Economy
by Alex Tan on 04-13-2018 at 12:00 pm


The theme of this year CDNLive Silicon Valley keynote given by Cadence CEO, Lip-Bu Tan evolves around data and how it drives Cadence to make a transition from System Design Enablement (SDE) to Data Driven Enablement (DDE). Before elaborating further, he noted on some CDNLive conference statistics: 120 sessions, 84% done by users,… Read More


Functional Safety Methodologies for Automotive Applications

Functional Safety Methodologies for Automotive Applications
by Alex Tan on 04-03-2018 at 12:00 pm

During Q&A session at San Jose GTC 2018, nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang reiterated that critical functional safety, such as in autonomous vehicle, requires both the redundancy and the diversity aspects. For example, CUDA with Tensor core and GPU with DLA were both utilized. Safety is paramount to automotive applications. Any… Read More


Meeting the Challenges of National Defense Strategy

Meeting the Challenges of National Defense Strategy
by Alex Tan on 03-30-2018 at 7:00 am

In February this year, the Department of Defense (DoD) submitted a $686.1 billions budget for 2019 and published a National Defense Strategy outlining the overall spending for defense and military programs. The recently signed US $1.3 trillion spending bill included part of the funding. According to DoD Defense Budget Overview… Read More


Don’t Stand Between The Anonymous Bug and Tape-Out (Part 2 of 2)

Don’t Stand Between The Anonymous Bug and Tape-Out (Part 2 of 2)
by Alex Tan on 03-16-2018 at 7:00 am


The second panel is about system coverage and big data. Coverage metrics have been used to gauge the quality of verification efforts during development. At system level, there are still no standardized metrics to measure full coverage. The emergence of PSS, better formal verification, enhanced emulation and prototyping techniques… Read More


Don’t Stand Between The Anonymous Bug and Tape-Out (Part 1 of 2)

Don’t Stand Between The Anonymous Bug and Tape-Out (Part 1 of 2)
by Alex Tan on 03-09-2018 at 7:00 am

In the EDA space, nothing seems to be more fragmented in-term of solutions than in the Design Verification (DV) ecosystem. This was my apparent impression from attending the four panel sessions plus numerous paper presentations given during DVCon 2018 held in San Jose. Both key management and technical leads from DV users communityRead More


EDA and Semiconductor — Is There Growth In The Ecosystem?

EDA and Semiconductor — Is There Growth In The Ecosystem?
by Alex Tan on 03-07-2018 at 12:00 pm


The semiconductor industry has gone through several major transitions driven by different dynamics such as shift in business models (fab-centric to fab-less), product segmentation (system design house, IP developers) and end market applications (PC to cloud; and recently, to both automotive and Internet of Things — IOT’s,Read More


Students Should Attend DAC in SFO

Students Should Attend DAC in SFO
by Daniel Payne on 03-06-2018 at 12:00 pm

On LinkedIn I have some 2,116 connections and many of those are students looking to enter the field of EDA, IP or semiconductor design. What a wonderful opportunity these students have by attending the 55th annual DAC in San Francisco this summer from June 24-28. Technical sessions, keynote speeches, exhibitors, networking, … Read More


PCB Design in the Cloud

PCB Design in the Cloud
by Daniel Payne on 02-28-2018 at 12:00 pm

I remember meeting John Durbetaki at Intel where we both worked in 1980, it was an exciting time and something called the Personal Computer had just been introduced by companies like Commodore, Apple and Radio Shack (yes, Radio Shack). IBM was rather late to the party with their PC in 1981, however when IBM entered the market then … Read More


IPC-2581: The Standard for PCB Data Exchange

IPC-2581: The Standard for PCB Data Exchange
by Tom Dillinger on 02-19-2018 at 12:00 pm

The motivations to establish an industry standard data format are varied:

[LIST=1]

  • solidify a “de facto” standard, transitioning its evolution and support from a single company to an industry consortium;
  • aggregate disparate sources of design and manufacturing data into a single representation, with documented semantics;
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