Power and Reliability Sign-off – A must, but how?

Power and Reliability Sign-off – A must, but how?
by Pawan Fangaria on 07-29-2013 at 11:00 am

At the onset of SoCs with multiple functionalities being packed together at the helm of technologies to improve upon performance and area; power, which was earlier neglected, has become critical and needs special attention in designing SoCs. And there comes reliability considerations as well due to multiple electrical and … Read More


From Layout Sign-off to RTL Sign-off

From Layout Sign-off to RTL Sign-off
by Pawan Fangaria on 07-25-2013 at 5:00 am

This week, I had a nice opportunity meeting Charu Puri, Corporate Marketing and Sushil Gupta, V.P. & Managing Director at Atrenta, Noida. Well, I know Sushil since 1990s; in fact, he was my manager at one point of time during my job earlier than Cadence. He leads this large R&D development centre, consisting about 200 people… Read More


Metastability Starts With Standard Cells

Metastability Starts With Standard Cells
by Daniel Nenni on 07-24-2013 at 8:05 pm

Metastability is a critical SoC failure mode that occurs at the interface between clocked and clockless systems. It’s a risk that must be carefully managed as the industry moves to increasingly dense designs at 28nm and below. Blendics is an emerging technology company that I have been working with recently, their MetaACERead More


Debugging Verification Constraints

Debugging Verification Constraints
by Paul McLellan on 07-23-2013 at 3:44 pm

In his DAC keynote last year (2012) Mike Mueller of ARM compared how much CPU was required to verify the first ARM versus one of the latest ARM Cortex CPUs. Of course the newer CPU is hundreds of times larger than the first ARM but the amount of verification required was millions of times as much, requiring ARM to construct their own datacenter… Read More


Around the World in 80 Engineers…Actually Well Over 200

Around the World in 80 Engineers…Actually Well Over 200
by Paul McLellan on 07-23-2013 at 12:19 pm

Atrenta today announced Dr Ajith Pasqual, who is the Head of the Department of Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka (which used to be known as Ceylon) has joined Atrenta’s technical advisory board (TAB). OK, academics join EDA company’s TABs all the time so that’s… Read More


Efficient Power Analysis and Reduction at RTL Level

Efficient Power Analysis and Reduction at RTL Level
by Pawan Fangaria on 07-22-2013 at 12:30 am

It’s a classic and creative example of design and EDA tool community getting together, exploiting tool capabilities and developing flows which add value to all stake holders including the end consumer. We know power has become extremely important for battery life in smart phones, high performance servers, workstations, notebooks… Read More


A Brief History of VLSI Technology, part 2

A Brief History of VLSI Technology, part 2
by Paul McLellan on 07-21-2013 at 9:00 pm

Part 1

VLSI’s business grew healthily but it never threw off enough cash to fund all the investment required for process technology development and capital investment for a next generation fab. They made a strategic partnership with Hitachi covering both 1um process technology and a significant investment, which meant that … Read More


New Book on Design Constraints

New Book on Design Constraints
by Paul McLellan on 07-20-2013 at 10:18 pm

There is a new book out from Springer. The subtitle is actually a better description that the title. The subtitle is A Practical Guide to Synopsys Design Constraints (SDC) but the title isConstraining Designs for Synthesis and Timing Analysis. The authors are Sridhar Gangadharan of Atrenta in San Jose and Sanjay Churiwala of Xilinx… Read More


“NoC, NoC” – Are You Listening to nVidia’s Dally?

“NoC, NoC” – Are You Listening to nVidia’s Dally?
by Randy Smith on 07-18-2013 at 11:00 pm

Recently Bill Dally, nVidia’s Chief Scientist & SVP of Research, and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University, has been out speaking quite a bit including a “short keynote” at the Design Automation Conference and a keynote at ISC 2013. The DAC audience is primarily EDA tool users and… Read More


Configurable System IP from a Tool Provider

Configurable System IP from a Tool Provider
by Randy Smith on 07-18-2013 at 11:00 pm

While I have previously blogged on Forte’s Cynthesizer Workbench’s Interface Generator, I want to take another look from a different perspective. Watching the tool and IP together in action through public videos provided by Forte it struck me as odd what I did not consider earlier, on what should have been obvious to me – Forte is… Read More