Fast Monte Carlo and Analog Fast SPICE

Fast Monte Carlo and Analog Fast SPICE
by Daniel Payne on 06-08-2012 at 10:25 am

Britto Vincent of ProPlus Design Solutions met with me at DAC on Monday morning to talk about Design For Yield (DFY) and Analog Fast SPICE.

In 2011 ProPlus announced DFY tools where the technology came from IBM, it provides fast Monte Carlo results up to 3 sigma, then added NanoSpice for faster simulation results. Similar in approach… Read More


How many languages an Engineer should speak?

How many languages an Engineer should speak?
by ahmed.shahein on 06-08-2012 at 9:37 am

I speak VHDL and SystemC, others speak Verilog and SystemVerilog … what do you speak?

Before getting into the core of the topic let me give you some round figures, engineers love numbers. Julian Lonsdale “European Sales Manager at Aldec” informed me at the Xfest Munich last month that Aldec carried out a survey to evaluate the usage… Read More


Partitioning Panel

Partitioning Panel
by Paul McLellan on 06-06-2012 at 4:53 pm

I moderated a panel on partitioning today and I have to say that I learned some things. The panelists were Jonathan DeMent from IBM, Santosh Santosh from NVIDIA and Hao Nham of eSilicon. Considering the different types of designs being done their approach to partitioning and the reasons for doing so were very similar.

When you first… Read More


Collaboration at 28nm, 20nm and 14nm

Collaboration at 28nm, 20nm and 14nm
by Daniel Payne on 06-06-2012 at 11:23 am


Wednesday morning I attended a panel discussion with: ARM, IBM, Cadence, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung.

The panelists all sang the same song of collaboration between EDA, IP and Foundry to enable 28nm, 20nm and even 14nm.… Read More


Virtual Platforms plus FPGA Prototyping, the Perfect Mix

Virtual Platforms plus FPGA Prototyping, the Perfect Mix
by Paul McLellan on 06-03-2012 at 8:59 pm

There are two main approaches to building a substructure on which to do software development and architectural analysis before a chip is ready: virtual platforms and FPGA prototyping.

Virtual platforms have the advantage that they are fairly quick to produce and can be created a long time before RTL design for the various blocks… Read More


Understanding and Designing For Variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm

Understanding and Designing For Variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm
by Daniel Nenni on 06-03-2012 at 8:30 pm

On Wednesday there is a User Track Poster Session that examines the design impact of process variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm technology. For those of you who are wondering what process variation looks like at 20nm take this 28nm example and multiply it by one hundred (slight exaggeration, maybe).

Variation effects have a significant… Read More


Spyglass by Atrenta

Spyglass by Atrenta
by Paul McLellan on 06-03-2012 at 4:27 pm

I’ve been helping get booths set up at DAC in Moscone for the last couple of days. Atrenta’s booth shows their new branding that I talked about last week. Now you can see what they are doing in this picture of their booth. As I sort of guessed they are leading with the Spyglass name. The booth says everywhere “Spyglass… Read More


EDAC emerging companies, Hogan evening

EDAC emerging companies, Hogan evening
by Paul McLellan on 06-01-2012 at 12:14 am


This evening at Silicon Valley Bank was the first of what is planned to be a series about EDA startups. Apparently the seed of the idea was planted by Dan Nenni with Jim Hogan and Steve Pollock and the EDAC Emerging Companies committee ran with it.… Read More


Mentor Graphics Update 2012!

Mentor Graphics Update 2012!
by Daniel Nenni on 05-30-2012 at 3:30 pm

What is new with Mentor? Quite a bit actually. About this time last year Corporate Raider Carl Icahn stirred things up with a hostile takeover attempt that ended with three Raiderettes on the Mentor Board, out of eight board members total. This year however, two of the three Raiderettes are out so it looks like Mentor is firmly in control.… Read More


SpyGlass…the Mystery

SpyGlass…the Mystery
by Paul McLellan on 05-30-2012 at 1:30 am

Atrenta have put out a mysterious press release, a sort of teaser for what they are up to at DAC.

The first part is that they have an interview program at their booth (#2230) on the show floor where customers, partners and investors will talk about SpyGlass. Current speakers are:

  • Jack Browne (Sonics)
  • Jim Hogan (private investor)
  • Charlie
Read More