Despite the large role of place and route in IC design, there will always be a need for custom layout design. This is particularly true in radio frequency (RF), power management (PM) and power amplifier (PA) circuits, among others. Cadence Virtuoso is by far the leading tool for creating these custom designs. Virtuoso has a sophisticated… Read More
IC design challenges are different at advanced nodes like 7nm, so to learn more about the topic I attended a panel luncheon at DAC sponsored by Cadence. The moderator was both funny and technically astute, quite the rare combination, so kudos to Professor Rob Rutenbar, a former Neolinear guy now at the University of Illinois. Panelists… Read More
One of the most interesting presentations that I went to was the last presentation at the Synopsys Custom Lunch (no, the lunch wasn’t custom, we all got the same, but the presentations were about custom design). Since the last presentation was by Synopsys themselves and not by a customer, it wouldn’t seem promising that it could … Read More
In an overwhelmingly digital world, there is a constant cry about the analog design process being slow, not automated, going at its own pace in the same old fashion, and so on. And, the analog world is not happy with the way it’s getting dragged into imperfect automation so it can be more like the digital world. True, the analog world… Read More
It is no secret that custom ICs are getting larger and more complex and this has driven chip design teams to split up into smaller teams to handle the manual or semi-automated routing of the many blocks and hierarchical layers that go to make up such a design. These sub-teams don’t just need to handle the routing within their own block(s)… Read More
