DAC Deadlines: Action This Day

DAC Deadlines: Action This Day
by Paul McLellan on 11-02-2014 at 7:00 am

DAC is coming up. OK, it’s not actually until next June. It is June 7-11th 2015 at the Moscone Center here in San Francisco. But there are lots of important deadlines coming up for papers, panels and more. The 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] DAC will focus on five key tracks:

  • automotive
  • IP design
  • embedded systems
  • hardware/software security
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Key Collaboration to Enable Designs at Advanced Nodes

Key Collaboration to Enable Designs at Advanced Nodes
by Pawan Fangaria on 10-03-2014 at 10:00 pm

In the semiconductor ecosystem, several partners (or better to say stakeholders) join together in the overall value chain to finally output the most coveted chip, err I should say SoC these days. It becomes really interesting when we start analyzing the real value added by each of them, none appears to be less. Well, then to whom … Read More


IP and Design Management Done Right

IP and Design Management Done Right
by Daniel Payne on 09-30-2014 at 4:30 pm

At DACin San Francisco this past June I was able to visit and blog about two dozen EDA companies, however there were so many more products and events to see that I couldn’t possibly have enough time to enjoy them all. Fortunately for me there were plenty of videos made of vendor presentations, so this week I got caught up a bit by… Read More


Samsung 14nm FinFET Design with Cadence Tools

Samsung 14nm FinFET Design with Cadence Tools
by Daniel Payne on 09-22-2014 at 5:30 pm

The first consumer products with 20nm processing are arriving in 2014 like the 2 billion transistor A8 chip in the iPhone 6, however at the 14nm node there are new designs underway to continue the trend of Moore’s Law. To get a better feel for the challenges of designing with 14nm FinFET technology I watched a 23 minute video … Read More


Automatic RTL Restructuring: A Need Rather Than Convenience

Automatic RTL Restructuring: A Need Rather Than Convenience
by Pawan Fangaria on 08-22-2014 at 5:00 pm

In the semiconductor design industry, most of the designs are created and optimized at the RTL level, mainly through home grown scripts or manual methods. As there can be several iterations in optimizing the hierarchy for physical implementation, it’s too late to do the hierarchical optimizations after reaching the floor plan… Read More


Crossfire – Your partner for IP development, what’s new?

Crossfire – Your partner for IP development, what’s new?
by Pawan Fangaria on 08-21-2014 at 4:00 pm

As the SoCs and IPs grow in sizes and complexities, the number of formats, databases, libraries of standard cells and IOs also increase. It becomes a clumsy task to check every cell in a library, its consistency among various format with respect to functionality, timing, naming, labels and so on, and its complex physical properties… Read More


S-engine Moves up the Integration of IPs into SoCs

S-engine Moves up the Integration of IPs into SoCs
by Pawan Fangaria on 07-07-2014 at 8:30 am

As the semiconductor design community is seeing higher and higher levels of abstraction with standard IPs and other complex, customized IPs and sub-systems integrated together at the system level, sooner than later we will find SoCs to be just assemblies of numerous IPs selected off-the-self according to the design needs and… Read More


Wally Rhines at #51DAC: EDA Grows From Solving New Problems

Wally Rhines at #51DAC: EDA Grows From Solving New Problems
by Paul McLellan on 06-24-2014 at 8:23 pm

Wally Rhines gave the keynote at DAC in 2004. One of the things that he pointed out ten years ago was that EDA revenue for any given market segment is pretty much flat once the initial growth phase has taken place and the market has been established. Incremental EDA revenue only comes from delivering new capabilities. Historically… Read More