ARM TechCon 2011 Trip Report and Sailing Semiconductors!

ARM TechCon 2011 Trip Report and Sailing Semiconductors!
by Daniel Nenni on 10-26-2011 at 9:37 pm

This was my first ARM TechCon, they cordially invited me as media, but it certainly was not what I expected. Making matters worse, I had literally just flown in from a very long weekend sailing in Mexico which was much more interesting and certainly made me much less tolerant of sales and marketing nonsense. My Uncle Jim lives on a sailboat… Read More


Oct 27 – Hands-on Workshop with Calibre: DRC, LVS, DFM, xRC, ERC (Fremont, California)

Oct 27 – Hands-on Workshop with Calibre: DRC, LVS, DFM, xRC, ERC (Fremont, California)
by Daniel Payne on 10-20-2011 at 9:56 am

I’ve blogged about the Calibre family of IC design tools before:

Smart Fill replaced Dummy Fill Approach in a DFM Flow

DRC Wiki

Graphical DRC vs Text-based DRC

Getting Real time Calibre DRC Results with Custom IC Editing

Transistor-level Electrical Rule Checking

Who Needs a 3D Field Solver for IC Design?

Prevention is BetterRead More


Apache on the Road

Apache on the Road
by Paul McLellan on 10-19-2011 at 2:01 pm

There are lots of places that Apache is going to popping up in the next few weeks.

Firstly, Andrew Yang will deliver the keynote on October 24th at the Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (EPEPS) in San Jose. He will be talking about “Chip-Package-System convergence: bridging multiple disciplings… Read More


Mentor at the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Ecosystem Forum

Mentor at the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Ecosystem Forum
by Daniel Payne on 10-17-2011 at 3:14 pm

EDA companies and foundries must closely collaborate in order to deliver IC tool flows that work without surprises at the 40nm and 28nm nodes.

Tomorrow in San Jose
you can attend this 4th annual event hosted by TSMC along with Mentor Graphics and other EDA and IP companies.

Here are some of the topics that will interest IC designers… Read More


Soft IP Qualification

Soft IP Qualification
by Paul McLellan on 10-14-2011 at 3:10 pm

At the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Ecosystem Forum (try saying that three times in a row) next week (on Tuesday 18th), Atrenta will present a paper on the TSMC soft IP qualification flow. It will be presented by Anuj Kumar, senior manager of the customer consulting group.

More and more, chips are not put together what we think of … Read More


A New Name: ‘Si2Con’ Arrives October 20th!

A New Name: ‘Si2Con’ Arrives October 20th!
by Daniel Nenni on 10-11-2011 at 7:58 pm

In case you have not heard, the 16th Si2-hosted conference highlighting industry progress in design flow interoperability comes to Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, CA) on October 20th. Si2Con will showcase recent progress of members in the critical areas of:

[LIST=1]

  • Design tool flow integration (OpenAccess)
  • DRC / DFM / Parasitics
  • Read More

    SoC Realization: Let’s Get Physical!

    SoC Realization: Let’s Get Physical!
    by Paul McLellan on 10-05-2011 at 1:41 pm

    If you ask design groups what the biggest challenges are to getting a chip out on time, then the top two are usually verification, and getting closure after physical design. Not just timing closure, but power and area. One of the big drivers of this is predicting and avoiding excessive routing congestion, which is something that … Read More


    Memory Cell Characterization with a Fast 3D Field Solver

    Memory Cell Characterization with a Fast 3D Field Solver
    by Daniel Payne on 09-29-2011 at 12:07 pm

    Memory designers need to predict the timing, current and power of their designs with high accuracy before tape-out to ensure that all the design goals will be met. Extracting the parasitic values from the IC layout and then running circuit simulation is a trusted methodology however the accuracy of the results ultimately depend… Read More


    Nanometer Circuit Verification: The Catch-22 of Layout!

    Nanometer Circuit Verification: The Catch-22 of Layout!
    by Daniel Nenni on 09-19-2011 at 8:00 pm

    As analog and mixed-signal designers move to very advanced geometries, they must grapple with more and more complex considerations of the silicon. Not only do nanometer CMOS devices have limitations in terms of analog-relevant characteristics such gain and noise performance, but they also introduce new sources of variation… Read More


    Fast Track Seminars

    Fast Track Seminars
    by Paul McLellan on 09-15-2011 at 6:11 pm


    Atrenta’s SoC realization seminars, “Fast Track Your SoC Design” have started.The first one was in Ottowa last Tuesday, and it was a full house. In a straw poll, most of the attendees acknowledged facing IP handoff and quality issues. The keynote speaker was Dr Yuejian Wu, director of ASIC development at Infinera… Read More