Unlock first-time-right complex photonic integrated circuits

Unlock first-time-right complex photonic integrated circuits
by Raha Vafaei on 06-01-2022 at 10:00 am

EPDA overview

The capacity and energy efficiency challenges from the growing appetite for high-speed data along with advanced applications such as LIDAR and quantum computing are driving demand for increasingly large-scale photonic integrated circuits (PIC). With an ever-increasing number of components on a single photonic chip, manual… Read More


EDA in the Cloud – Now More Than Ever

EDA in the Cloud – Now More Than Ever
by Kalar Rajendiran on 07-27-2021 at 10:00 am

Screen Shot 2021 07 14 at 4.32.16 PM

A decade ago, many of us heard commentaries on how entrepreneurs were turned down by venture capitalists for not including a cloud strategy in their business plan, no matter what the core business was. Humorous punchlines such as, “It’s cloudy without any clouds” and “Add some cloud to your strategy and your future will be bright… Read More


RealTime Digital DRC Can Save Time Close to Tapeout

RealTime Digital DRC Can Save Time Close to Tapeout
by Tom Simon on 06-07-2021 at 6:00 am

RealTime DRC

Over the years DRC tools have done an admirable job of keeping pace with the huge growth of IC design size. Yet, DRC runs for sign off on the full design using foundry rule decks take many hours to complete. These long run times are acceptable for final sign off, but there are many situations where DRC results are needed quickly when small… Read More


Analysis of Curvilinear FPDs

Analysis of Curvilinear FPDs
by Daniel Payne on 12-31-2020 at 6:00 am

FPD voltage distribution analysis min

This area of automating the design of Flat Panel Displays (FPD) is so broad that it has taken me three blogs to cover all of the details, so in brief review the first two blogs were:

My final blog covers five areas:

  • DRC/LVS for curvilinear layout
  • Circuit
Read More

Calibre Commences Cloud Computing

Calibre Commences Cloud Computing
by Tom Simon on 11-06-2019 at 10:00 am

Calibre was a big game changer for DRC users when it first came out. Its hierarchical approach dramatically shortened runtimes with the same accuracy as other existing, but slower, flat tools. However, one unsung part of this story was that getting Calibre up and running required minimal effort for users. Two things are required… Read More


Qualcomm Attests Benefits of Mentor’s RealTime DRC for P&R

Qualcomm Attests Benefits of Mentor’s RealTime DRC for P&R
by Tom Simon on 01-31-2019 at 7:00 am

When floor planning (FP) and place & route (P&R) tools took over from custom layout tools for standard cell based designs, life became a lot better for designers of large digital chips. The beauty of the new flows was that all the internals of the standard cells and many IP blocks were hidden from view, lightening the load … Read More


Achieving Clean Design Early with Calibre-RTD

Achieving Clean Design Early with Calibre-RTD
by Alex Tan on 06-21-2018 at 4:00 pm

Functional and physical verification are easily the two long poles in most IC product developments. During a design implementation cycle, design teams tend to push physical verification (PV) step towards the end as it is a time consuming process and requires significant manual interventions.

PV Challenges
In the traditional… Read More


Robust Reliability Verification – A Critical Addition To Baseline Checks

Robust Reliability Verification – A Critical Addition To Baseline Checks
by Alex Tan on 03-01-2018 at 12:00 pm

Design process retargeting is acommon recurrence based on scaling orBOM(Bill-Of-Material) cost improvement needs. This occursnot only with the availability of foundry process refresh to a more advanced node,but also to any new derivative process node tailored towards matching design complexity, power profile or reliabilityRead More


Is there anything in VLSI layout other than “pushing polygons”? (5)

Is there anything in VLSI layout other than “pushing polygons”? (5)
by Dan Clein on 01-11-2018 at 12:00 pm

Being new in Ottawa and trying to get some momentum towards automation in full custom layout I was telling industry people that I am interested to work with everybody to move this agenda forward. My Director of Engineering at that time, Peter Gillingham, took me to visit Carleton University in Ottawa. One of his professor friends,… Read More


High Calibre Development Keeps Mentor on Top of the Game

High Calibre Development Keeps Mentor on Top of the Game
by Tom Simon on 12-07-2017 at 12:00 pm

One might be tempted to think that technology driven gains in computer performance might be enough to keep up with the needs of design and verification tools. We know that design complexity is increasing at a rate predicted by Moore’s Law. We also know that the performance of the computers used during IC development benefit from … Read More