There are two ways to see how resistant your designs are to single-event errors (SEE). One is to take the chip or even the entire system and put it in a neutron beam and measure how many problems occur in this extreme environment. While that may be a necessary part of qualification in some very high reliability situations, it is also … Read More
Gary Smith has been talking about how the electronic system level (ESL) is where the future of EDA lies as design teams move up to higher levels encompassing IP blocks, high level synthesis, software development using virtual platforms and so on. At DAC this year in Austin he talked about how the fact that EDA controls the modeling… Read More
I could have written the sequence of the title in reverse order, but no, design is the one which initiates the need of a particular flow and the flow needs support of EDA tools to satisfy that need. It’s okay if the design is small; some manual procedures and workarounds/scripts may be able to perform certain jobs. However, as the design… Read More
SEMICON Taiwan is September 3rd to 6th in TWTC Nangang Exhibition Hall. Just as with Semicon West in July in San Francisco, there is lots going on. But one special focus is 3D IC. There is a 3DIC and substrate pavilion on the exhibit floor and an Advanced Packaging Symposium. Design tools, manufacturing, packaging and testing solutions… Read More
Of course if you are in the business of selling high-level synthesis (HLS) tools then the obvious answer is immediately. Start at 9am tomorrow morning. But a more realistic answer is when you are having to do something completely new. If you are working on a legacy design, perhaps with pre-existing IP, then moving the design up to … Read More
Well, Sweden is not noted for its carnivals, Brazil is not noted for it’s tall blonde blue-eyed women, Sweden’s climate is not great for growing sugar cane and Brazil’s isn’t great for reindeer. Both countries speak languages with odd-sounding vowels but they are not the same language. But, ding, Jasper… Read More
Sometimes press releases just make me scratch my head. Today’s example comes from IBM: after tying PowerPC and Power.org in knots for almost 20 years with rules and restrictive licensing, IBM breaks ranks and sets up ANOTHER consortium with different players.… Read More
GenApSys is a biotech company developing proprietary DNA sequencing technology. As part of that they develop their own custom sequencing chips. These have an analog component and like many people they use the Cadence Virtuoso analog design environment for this.
I talked to Hamid Rategh who is GenApSys’s VP engineering.… Read More
We all have a funnest bug we’ve been involved with. I don’t think ‘funnest’ is actually a word but when my kids used to use the word ‘funner’ I didn’t have a good argument as to why it wasn’t a word, it just seemed a word I’d never heard. In fact I have no idea what the rules are… Read More
Gary Smith did a nice write-up on the current state of electronics media. It’s posted on his Gary Smith EDAwebsite. Traditional media certainly is in transition and there is more change to come, definitely. Gary lists me as one of the heroes carrying the flag which is very nice of him to say. In reality though, he missed Paul … Read More
