Cadence and ARM BFF

Cadence and ARM BFF
by Paul McLellan on 03-13-2014 at 6:38 pm

The biggest market for semiconductors is mobile and an ARM processor is the center of the axle around which it revolves. So everyone in the mobile ecosystem needs to work closely with ARM. At CDNLive earlier this week Cadence and ARM announced that they are deepening their partnership. Most of what they announced makes it a lot easier… Read More


Mark your Date for Semiconductor Design Vision

Mark your Date for Semiconductor Design Vision
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-13-2014 at 4:30 am

A very popular acronym is ‘WYSIWYG’ – What You See Is What You Get! This is very true and is important to visualize things to make it better in various aspects such as aesthetics, compactness, organization, structure, understandable for correction and so on; the most important, in case of semiconductor design, is being able to identify… Read More


Calypto: the View From the Top

Calypto: the View From the Top
by Paul McLellan on 03-05-2014 at 10:37 pm

At DVCon today I talked to Sanjiv Kaul, the CEO of Calypto. Just as a reminder, Calypto have 3 products, SLEC (sequential logical equivalence checking, also called sequential formal verification), PowerPro (sequential RTL level power reduction) and Catapult High Level Synthesis (that they took over from Mentor in 2011 in a complicated… Read More


What I Didn’t Know about Electronic Design Automation

What I Didn’t Know about Electronic Design Automation
by Daniel Payne on 03-04-2014 at 7:36 pm

I started using internal EDA tools at Intel beginning in 1978 and have worked in the commercial EDA industry since 1986, so it was a delight to read a chapter about EDA in Nenni and McLellan’s newest book: Fabless – The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry. Starting in the 1970’s the authors talk about… Read More


Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler

Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler
by Paul McLellan on 03-04-2014 at 8:00 am

Integration is often an underrated attribute of good tools, compared to raw performance and technology. But these days integration is differentiation (try telling that to your calculus teacher). Today at DVCon Synopsys announced Verification Compiler which integrates pretty much all of Synopsys’s verification technologies… Read More


Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3

Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3
by Paul McLellan on 02-28-2014 at 12:17 pm

Since Synopsys acquired Eve over a year ago, they haven’t announced anything new in the ZeBu product line. Emulators are not like software where you expect incremental releases a couple of times per year, each new “release” is a complete re-design using new hardware fabric in a new process technology. Earlier… Read More


Friday Miscellany: EDAC Mixer, DVCon, DVCon Europe

Friday Miscellany: EDAC Mixer, DVCon, DVCon Europe
by Paul McLellan on 02-28-2014 at 8:31 am

Yesterday evening was EDAC’s first mixer. I assume the first of a regular event. It was held in Mountain View in the old train station which is now the Savvy Cellar wine bar. I had a nice glass of rosé from Provence that reminded me of the years that I lived in the south of France. Some of the money we spent went to charity, to the Mountain… Read More


Mounir Hahad Rejoins Silvaco

Mounir Hahad Rejoins Silvaco
by admin on 02-20-2014 at 4:16 pm

Mounir Hahad just joined Silvaco as VP engineering. And when I say joined I really mean rejoined. I had a call with him to find out how that happened.

Mounir studied in France for a PhD in computer science on numerical computing. In 1995 the then-director of TCAD at Silvaco called him up having read some of his published papers. Silvaco… Read More


Before SPICE Circuit Simulation Comes TCAD Tools

Before SPICE Circuit Simulation Comes TCAD Tools
by Daniel Payne on 02-20-2014 at 3:19 pm

I’ve run SPICE circuit simulators since the 1970’s and they use transistor models where the device parameters are provided by the foundry. These transistor and interconnect parameters come from an engineer at the foundry who has characterized silicon with actual measurements or by running a TCAD (Technology CAD)… Read More


Carbon Design Systems – Secret of Success

Carbon Design Systems – Secret of Success
by Pawan Fangaria on 02-19-2014 at 11:00 am


Last week, after learning from the press releaseof Carbonabout its rocking sustained growth with record-breaking revenue and a thumping 46% increase in bookings, I was interested to know some more details about what drives Carbon to such an amazing performance in an EDA market that is generally prone to growth of a few percentage… Read More