Since around the posting of my prior blog [Chip in the Clouds – “Gathering”] to now many events have taken place. Facebook announced its intent to acquire Instagram for $1B in cash and stock, completed its initial public offering, announced an Instagram competitive product by releasing “Facebook Camera” … Read More
Standards have been proven to reduce cost of operations, drive greater process efficiencies and offer greater opportunities for start-up companies to infuse fresh technology in the design and manufacturing of IC’s. Si2 standards have been targeted to resolve “pinch-points” in the overall semiconductor supply chain… Read More
Apache is one of the brightest stars in the EDA universe. Paul McLellan has done a nice job covering them before and after the Ansys acquisition. Check out the Apache SemiWiki landing page HERE. The Apache wikis are also very well done and it has been a pleasure working with the Apache marketing team. Expect more innovative things … Read More
Automation for digital design has been mainstream for a couple of decades but place and route for analog is still in its infancy. Many attempts have been made over the years to automate analog design in one way and another, the bodies are piled up on the hillside. Much analog design is still largely done with custom layout and circuit… Read More
EDAC has a series of seminars for emerging companies with Jim Hogan. Jim has been in EDA since, like, forever. First at National, then at Cadence, then at Artisan (now ARM) and then as an investor first at Telos (Cadence’s VC arm) and more recently on his own at Vista Ventures. He has been involved with many EDA and semiconductor… Read More
At EDPS in Monterey, Tom Spyrou of AMD talked about their compute environment in the context of parallel algorithms. I discovered that they are a big user of RTDA’s FlowTracer so I talked to Philip Steinke at AMD about how they used it.
He said that they largely use it as described in The Art of Flows as a graphical distributed … Read More
Before going to Munich to attend to CDN-Live, I took a look at the agenda to figure out which presentations to attend, and I must say it was not so easy to choose: CDN Live agendais dense, with multiple tracks running in parallel (Custom Design, Digital Implementations, Design IP, Functional Verifications and Verification IP, PCB… Read More
CPAK sounds like something politicians create to collect money, but in fact it is a Carbon Performance Analysis Kit. It consists of models, reference platform, initialization software (for bare metal CPAKs) or OS binary (for Linux and Android based CPAKs). They are (or will soon be) available for ARM Cortex A9, ARM Cortex A15 and… Read More
If you look real close at the #49 DAC floor plan you will see the tiny Intel booth dwarfed by those of TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and ARM. The number one semiconductor company in the world does not have the budget for the cornerstone conference of the semiconductor ecosystem? Oh my…… Intel has a big foundry hat and no cattle… Read More
Next month at DAC I plan to visit the ClioSoft booth to get an update on what’s new with hardware configuration management (HCM). Last year I met with Srinath Anantharaman to get an introduction to their company and how their tools are used by both front-end engineers and back-end IC layout designers.
Srinath Anantharaman,… Read More
