One Billion Transistor IC Layout Editing

One Billion Transistor IC Layout Editing
by Daniel Payne on 06-11-2012 at 6:33 pm

There are only a handful of billion transistor IC designs in existence today, so when an EDA company touts 1 trillion transistor IC layout editing then I take notice. This year at DAC I met with Katherine Hayes and Karen Mangum of Micro Magic to get an update on their IC layout tools.… Read More


From SPICE Netlist back to Schematics at DAC

From SPICE Netlist back to Schematics at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-11-2012 at 5:22 pm

I first heard about SPICE Vision Pro when working at Mentor Graphics where we needed a way to visualize SPICE netlists and debug SPICE simulation results node by node on a design where we didn’t have the original schematics. Last Monday I met the engineers from Concept Engineering in their booth at DAC to get an update, Gerhard… Read More


Cadence/TSMC 3D

Cadence/TSMC 3D
by Paul McLellan on 06-11-2012 at 5:16 pm

Mark Twain remarked that everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. 3D ICs seems to be a bit like that. Over the last couple of years there have been lots of people talking about 3D but very little that has actually been manufactured. In addition to the weather, everyone talks about Xilinx’s 3D Virtex… Read More


Schematic, IC Layout, Clock and Timing Closure from ICScape

Schematic, IC Layout, Clock and Timing Closure from ICScape
by Daniel Payne on 06-08-2012 at 11:10 am

Before this DAC I had never even heard of ICScape, so on Monday and Wednesday I visited their booth to find out their story.

Steve Yang, Ph.D. (Co-founder and President), Ravi Ravikumar (Marketing)

ICScape was founded in 2005 in Santa Clara by Steve Yang (Circuit Design engineer for microprocessor, Synopsys) and Jason Xing (Sun… Read More


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