Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile

Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 04-25-2013 at 11:54 am

Mobile devices are taking over the world. If you want lots of graphs and data then look at Mary Meeker’s presentation that I blogged about earlier this week. The graph on the right is just one datapoint, showing that mobile access to the internet is probably up to about 15% now from a standing start 5 years ago.

Of course, one obvious… Read More


ESD – Key issue for IC reliability, how to prevent?

ESD – Key issue for IC reliability, how to prevent?
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-23-2013 at 8:30 pm

It’s a common electrical rule that when large amount of charge gets accumulated, it tries to break any of its surrounding isolation. Although it wouldn’t have been prominent in 1980s or 90s, protection for ICs from such damaging effects is a must, specifically in large mixed-signal designs of today, working at different voltages… Read More


Forte Rises

Forte Rises
by Randy Smith on 04-23-2013 at 3:00 am

Over the past few months there has been a bit of back-and-forth concerning the 2012 market data indicating that Forte Designs Systems had taken over the top spot (by revenue) in the high-level synthesis (HLS) market (see stories hereand here). Having worked in this segment for Synfora as VP of Marketing, and as a consultant to AutoESL,… Read More


FinFET Day Presentations at EDPS Monterey!

FinFET Day Presentations at EDPS Monterey!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-22-2013 at 10:00 am

If you are ever asked to organize a conference session do not hesitate, accept immediately and jump right in. When John Swan, EDPS General Chair, asked me to organize a day I hesitated. Fortunately he is not one to take no for an answer. It was an unforgettable experience on many levels and I hope to be involved with EDPS again next year.… Read More


Happy Birthday to Synopsys VIP

Happy Birthday to Synopsys VIP
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2013 at 3:25 am

I met Mike Sanie around DVCon time and planned to write a blog about the one year anniversary of Synopsys Discovery VIP which was announced during Aart’s keynote at DVCon in 2012. Eric covered it for SemiWiki here. But Synopsys had other stuff they wanted me to blog about and so it is a couple of months late. The 14th month anniversary… Read More


Mentor’s New Embedded Strategy

Mentor’s New Embedded Strategy
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2013 at 2:01 am

If there is a trend I can detect in verification in 2013, it is taking verification environments and making the user interface, scripts, and tools work uniformly across the whole spectrum of possible verification “substrates” from virtual platforms, FPGA boards, emulation, actual chips, RTL simulation and so … Read More


A Brief History of Methodics

A Brief History of Methodics
by Daniel Nenni on 04-21-2013 at 8:15 pm

Methodics was founded in 2006 by 2 ex-Cadence experts in the Custom IC design tools space, Simon Butler and Fergus Slorach. They had a consulting company called IC Methods, active in Silicon Valley from 2000-2006, and when they needed to create a new company to service a consulting engagement that had turned into a product, they … Read More


ISCUG – Excellent Indian Conference, needs to grow

ISCUG – Excellent Indian Conference, needs to grow
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-21-2013 at 8:05 pm

Promoted by Accellera, SystemC User Groups are in work worldwide; NASCUGin North America, ESCUGin Europe and ISCUG in India. While I was shuffling between my day-to-day work and strategy management course/exams, I received an invitation from my long time colleague, President and CEO of Circuitsutra Technologies, Mr. UmeshRead More


Semiconductor PLM – Needs to be smart for techies

Semiconductor PLM – Needs to be smart for techies
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-18-2013 at 8:15 pm

During my long career in semiconductor, EDA, I have heard, believed and experienced that this is a knowledge industry swamped with rapid innovation and technology drivers; typical manufacturing product development processes like Gantt charts and others do not apply here. The fallback is that most of the time estimations are… Read More


Denali+Tensilica+Cosmic = Cadence

Denali+Tensilica+Cosmic = Cadence
by Paul McLellan on 04-17-2013 at 1:00 am

I won’t be able to attend Chris Rowen’s presentation here at the GlobalPress Electronic Summit since I’m going to the first day of the Linley Mobile Microprocessor conference. In fact I wonder if Chris himself will make it since he was running in the Boston marathon on Monday. He finished about 10 minutes before… Read More