Schematic Migration Across Foundries and Processes

Schematic Migration Across Foundries and Processes
by Daniel Nenni on 03-17-2013 at 8:10 pm

A dedicated schematic migration tool can save weeks of effort and allow companies to explore new foundry opportunities. Unfortunately moving analog and mixed signal design data between foundries and processes is a complex business. While engineers would rather spend their days creating new circuits, many spend time translating… Read More


Cadence IP Report Card 2013

Cadence IP Report Card 2013
by Daniel Nenni on 03-17-2013 at 7:00 pm

The challenges of developing IP blocks, integrating them correctly, and hitting the power, performance, area, and time to market requirements of a mobile SoC is a growing problem. At 20nm and 14nm the probability of a chip re-spin due to an error is approaching 50% and we all know how disastrous a re-spin can be, those are not good … Read More


Visual Debugging at Altera on Billion-Transistor Chips

Visual Debugging at Altera on Billion-Transistor Chips
by Daniel Payne on 03-15-2013 at 10:38 am

My first job out of college was doing transistor-level circuit design, so I’m always curious about how companies are doing billion-transistor chip design and debug these days at the FPGA companies.

I spoke with Yaron Kretchmer,he works at Altera and manages the engineering infrastructure group where they have a compute… Read More


Costello on Communicating a Compelling Company Story

Costello on Communicating a Compelling Company Story
by Paul McLellan on 03-14-2013 at 11:53 pm

The next EDAC sponsored emerging company series (what I’ve been calling Hogan University) is Joe Costello being interviewed on how to communicate a compelling company story. Anyone who saw Joe’s keynote at DAC several years ago will not want to miss this. I can’t promise that he’ll lie down on the stage… Read More


Synopsys ♥ TSMC!

Synopsys ♥ TSMC!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-14-2013 at 8:00 am

Dr. Paul McLellan and I will be covering the Silicon Valley SNUG live again this year. Unfortunately we are only allowed to see the keynotes (same thing with CDNLive) but they look very good:

Keynote Address: Massive Innovation and Collaboration into the “GigaScale” Age!
Aart de Geus, Chairman and co-CEO, Synopsys,
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Formal Verification of Power Intent

Formal Verification of Power Intent
by Paul McLellan on 03-13-2013 at 4:10 pm

I can’t imagine that any SoC today is designed without taking intense interest in how much power the chip will consume, whether it is destined for a mobile phone or tethered in a cloud datacenter. One challenge with power is that adding features like voltage islands or power-down areas require changes to the netlist such as… Read More


Ensuring timing of Custom Designs with large embedded memories – A big burden has solution!

Ensuring timing of Custom Designs with large embedded memories – A big burden has solution!
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-13-2013 at 10:30 am

In 1990s when designs were small, I was seeing design and EDA community struggling to improve upon huge time taken to verify the circuits, specifically with Spice and the like. I was myself working on developing tool for transistor level static timing analysis (STA) mainly to gain on time (eliminating the need of exhaustive set Read More


EDPS Monterey. Agenda Now Available

EDPS Monterey. Agenda Now Available
by Paul McLellan on 03-12-2013 at 8:13 pm

For 20 years there has been the Electronic Design Process Symposium. It has been held each April and for the last few years at least has always been in Monterey at the Monterey Beach Resort. This year it is Thursday and Friday April 18th/19th.

The keynote on the first day is by Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx on The All-programmable SoC —Read More


RTDA at Altera

RTDA at Altera
by Paul McLellan on 03-12-2013 at 8:05 pm

I talked to Yaron Kretchmer of Altera to find out how they are using RTDA’s products. I believe that Altera are the oldest customer of RTDA, dating back over 15 years, originally used by the operations team around the test floor before propagating out in the EDA and software worlds more recently.

Altera use two RTDA tools, LicenceMonitorRead More


Samsung and the New World Order!

Samsung and the New World Order!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-12-2013 at 7:52 pm

The keynotes at CDNLive today were very interesting, but rather than cover the slides and bullet points let me share with you my personal view of Samsung and how they are changing the semiconductor industry. Before I continue remember I’m just a blogger who shares observations, experiences, and opinions. This blog is for entertainment… Read More