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;
Read More

Data Security – Why It Might Matter to Design and EDA

Data Security – Why It Might Matter to Design and EDA
by Alex Tan on 02-14-2018 at 12:00 pm


According to the Economist,
The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data”.
Is this the case?Data is the by-product ofmany aspects of recent technology dynamics and is becoming the currency of today’s digital economy. All categories in Gartner’s Top10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018 (FigureRead More


Machine Learning And Design Into 2018 – A Quick Recap

Machine Learning And Design Into 2018 – A Quick Recap
by Alex Tan on 02-07-2018 at 3:00 pm

How could we differentiate between deep learning and machine learning as there are many ways of describing them? A simple definition of these software terms can be found here. Let’s look into Artificial Intelligence (AI), which was coined back in 1956. The term AI can be defined as human intelligence exhibited by machines.Read More


TSMC EDA 2.0 With Machine Learning: Are We There Yet ?

TSMC EDA 2.0 With Machine Learning: Are We There Yet ?
by Alex Tan on 11-06-2017 at 7:00 am

Recently we have been swamped by news of Artificial Intelligence applications in hardware and software by the increased adoption of Machine Learning (ML) and the shift of electronic industry towards IoT and automobiles. While plenty of discussions have covered the progress of embedded intelligence in product roll-outs, anRead More