We all know the concept of “one stop shop”, becoming popular in the Design IP market. The topic we will address today is NOT the “one stop shop”, even if it looks similar, but rather that we could call “consistent design flow”.
What does that means? Simply that, if your SoC design is integrating a DDRn (LPDDR2, DDR3 or even DDR4, let’s… Read More
A couple of weeks ago was the 3D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packagingconference in Redwood City. Cadence presented the changes that they have been making to their tool flow to enabled 2.5D (interposer-based) and true 3D TSV-based designs. You know what TSV stands for by now right? Through-silicon-via, … Read More
We know by now that clock speeds aren’t everything when it comes to measuring the goodness of a processor. Performance has direct ties to pipeline and interconnect details, power factors into considerations of usability, and the unspoken terms of yield drive cost.
My curiosity kicked in when I looked at the recent press release… Read More
I have participated to a panel during IP-SoC, I must say that “Subsystem IP, myth or Reality” was a great moment. The panel was a mix of mid-size IP vendor (CAST, Sonics), one large EDA (Martin Lund from Cadence), Semiwiki blogger and one large IDM (Peter Hirt from STM) who has very well represented the customer side. And, to make the… Read More
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
