I reviewed the book Mixed-Signal Methodology Guidein August of this year published by Cadence, and decided to follow up with one of the authors, Michael Henrie from ClioSoft, to learn more about the importance of Design Management for AMS. Michael is a Software Engineering Manager at ClioSoft and has worked at Zarlink Semi, Legerity,… Read More
I met Frank Wiedmann on LinkedIn because we are both members of the Analog Mixed Signal group, and he has an interesting background in AMS IC design.
Since he lives in Munich we conducted our interview by email.… Read More
We have shown in Semiwiki how strong Cadence position was in Verification IP (VIP) in a previous post focusing on Interface standards like SuperSpeed USB or PCI Express. But IP based functions are used everywhere in a SoC, not only to interface with the external world, and need to be verified, as well, like for AMBA based functions.… Read More
Electromigration (EM) is a reliability concern for IC designers because a failure in the field could spell disaster as in lost human life or even bankruptcy for a consumer electronics company. In the old days of IC design we would follow a sequential and iterative design process of:… Read More
An announcement at the ARM conference was of a joint project to tape out an ARM Cortex-M0 in IBM’s 14nm FinFET process. In fact they taped out 3 different versions of the chip using different routing architectures to see the impact on yield.
This was the first 14nm ARM tapeout, it seems. I’m sure Intel has built plenty … Read More
The Silicon Valley CDNLive, the Cadence user conference, will be on March 12-13th 2013 in Santa Clara. But the heart of CDNLive are customer presentations and the call for papers is now open. The deadline is December 4th (at 5pm PST for people who really like to come down to the wire). At this point only an abstract is required.
There… Read More
Once upon a time (since every good story begins that way), I worked on 10kg, 70 mm diameter things that leapt out of tubes and chased after airplanes and helicopters. The electronics for these things were fairly marvelous, in the days when surface mount technology was in its infancy and having reliability problems in some situations.… Read More
Cadence has apparently announced that going forward the Virtuoso environment is going to be split into two and offered as two separate code-streams, the current IC6.x and a new IC12.x. The idea is to introduce a new product with features that were specifically developed for new technologies such as double patterning aware layout… Read More
Looking at the Press Release (PR) flow, it was interesting to see how TSMC has solved a communication dilemma. At first, let’s precise that #1 Silicon foundry has to work with each of the big three EDA companies. As a foundry, you don’t want to lose any customer, and then you support every major design flow. Choosing another strategy… Read More
At advanced process nodes, variation and its effects on the design become a huge challenge. Join Cadence® Virtuoso® experts for a series of technical webinars on variation-aware design. Learn how to use advanced technologies and tools to analyze and understand the affects of variation. We’ll introduce you to the latest Virtuoso… Read More
