Designing an LTE modem is an interesting case study in architectural and system level design because it is pretty much on the limit of what is possible in a current process node such as 28nm. I talked to Johannes Stahl of Synopsys about how you would accomplish this with the Synopsys suite of system level tools. He is the first to admit… Read More
October 16[SUP]th[/SUP] at the Computer History Museum, EDAC is hosting EDA: Back to the Future to celebrate 50 years of EDA. EDAC always has a fall event of some sort and historically it has been the Kaufman Award Dinner. This year, the Kaufman Award was presented (to Chenming Hu) at 50[SUP]th[/SUP] DAC, so the fall EDAC calendar… Read More
Lately I was studying about new innovations in memory world such as ReRAM and Memristor. As DRAM (although it has become a commodity) has found its extensive use in mobile, PC, tablet and so on, that was an inclination too to know more about. While reviewing Cadence’s offering in memory subsystems, I came across this whitepaperwhich… Read More
At TSMC’s OIP on October 1st, Mentor Graphics have 5 different presentations. Collect the whole set!
11am, EDA track. Design Reliability with Calibre Smartfill and PERC. Muni Mohan of Broadcom and Jeff Wilson of Mentor. New methodologies were invented for 28nm for smart fill meeting DFM requirements (and at 20nm me may … Read More
As more people adopt high-level synthesis (HLS) they start to worry about what is the best design flow to be using. This is especially so for verification since it forms such a large part of the effort on a modern SoC. The more people rely on HLS for producing their RTL from C, the more they realize they had better do a good job of verifying… Read More
Increasingly, end users in some markets are requiring soft error rate (SER) data. This is a measure of how resistant the design (library, chip, system) is to single event effects (SEE). These manifest themselves as SEU (upset), SET (transient), SEL (latch-up), SEFI (functional interrupt).
There are two main sources that cause… Read More
Remember? During DAC2013 I talked about a new kind of innovation: A Virtual Fabrication Platform, SEMulator3D, developed by COVENTOR. Now, to my pleasant surprise, there is something to report on the proven results from this platform. IBM, in association with COVENTOR, has successfully implemented a 3D Virtual Fabrication… Read More
For decades we have used a model of faults in chips that assumes that a given signal is stuck-at-0 or stuck-at-1. And when I say decades, I mean it. The D-algorithm was invented at IBM in 1966, the year after Gordon Moore made a now very famous observation about the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. We know that stuck-at… Read More
Layout editing is a complex task, traditionally done manually by designers, and the layout design productivity largely depends on the designer’s skills and expertise. However, a good tool with features for ease of design is a must. Layout productivity has been an area of focus and various features are constantly being added in… Read More
You can only design and optimize for low-power SoC designs if you can actually simulate the entire Chip, Package and System together. The engineers at ANSYS-Apachehave figured out how to do that and talked about their design for power methodology in a webinar today. I listened to Arvind Shanmugavel present a few dozen slides and… Read More
