Most SoCs today are being prototyped in FPGA hardware before committing to costly IC fabrication. You could just design and build your own FPGA prototyping system, or instead choose something off the shelf and then concentrate on your core competence of SoC design.
Thanks to the FPGA vendors like Xilinx we now have FGPA prototyping… Read More
The tremendous growth in IC and SoC design complexity has now enabled engineers to place bilions of transistors on a single chip. To make that growth possible design teams resort to using libraries and semi IP provided by other groups in their company, or outside IP vendors. To lower risk, you must know that the IP being used in your… Read More
Sean Dart’s first DAC (Las Vegas) was as a customer in 1989. Designs were hitting 15,000 gates back then so he was looking for better schematic editors and simulators for gate level design. Fast forward 25 years and Sean’s customers are doing 15,000,000 gate subsystems and that number is growing steadily every year.… Read More
As an applications engineer for over 15 years supporting physical design tools that enable implementation closure, I have seen the complexity of timing closure grow continuously from one process node to the next. At 28nm, the number of scenarios for timing sign-off has increased to the extent that is way beyond the number that … Read More
Jerry Philippe used to work for me at Compass and then very briefly we worked together at VaST. Today he works for Calypto in Austin. And it is the Austin part that is important because Jerry knows where the places are in any city to get good food and drink but Austin is his home.
Austin has an extraordinary number of restaurants and bars.… Read More
With nearly twenty five years in business, Tanner EDA Application Engineers have seen a wide range of support requests. One consistent topic area is around design data management and design reuse. In one recent instance, our customer, an IDM who produces imaging sensors for infrared vision systems, called on Tanners AE team for… Read More
OK, enough with all this semiconductor geeky stuff. The important thing about DAC is…where to go to eat to avoid standard issue convention center chicken Caesar salad.
And a 7 minute walk from the convention center is Bangers Sausage House and Beer Gardenwhere you can have the $8 “executive” lunch consisting… Read More
Every process node these days has a new “gotcha” that designers need to be aware of. In some ways this has always been the case but the changes used to be gradual. But now each process node has something discontinuously different. At 20nm the big change is double patterning. At 14/16nm it is FinFET.
Rahul Deokar and John… Read More
This year’s #50DAC will be chock-full of technical content because that is what attracts the masses of semiconductor professionals, like moths to a flame, or like me to a Fry’s Electronics store. Interesting note, I went to high school with Randy Fry. His Dad started the Fry’s supermarket chain which he sold… Read More
Dassault Systèmes (DS) was created in 1981 when a small team of engineers were spun out of Dassault Aviation. They were developing software to design wind-tunnel models and so reduce the cycle time for wind-tunnel testing, using surface modeling in 3D instead. The company entered into a distribution agreement with IBM that same… Read More
