As the complexity of the chip-package-system (CPS) interactions has increased, the tradeoffs in doing a power and noise analysis has had to gradually increase. As is so often the case in semiconductor designs, issues first arise as second-order effects that can largely be ignored but each process node makes the problem worse … Read More
DAC is less than a month away, June 6-8th for the tradeshow, longer depending on what other events you might also be attending. Apache is in booth 2448 (marked in red on the DAC floorplan map.
Many of the presentations at the Apache booth will be customers (such as ARM, Xilinx, ST Ericsson, GlobalFoundries and TSMC) discussing various… Read More
The corporate raiders are still throwing rocks at Mentor Graphics. I have followed this reality show VERY closely and find their latest assault seriously counterproductive. Disinformation is common in EDA but I expected more from Carl Icahn and the Raiderettes. They are quite the drama queens. Here is a billion dollar question:… Read More
I was at Mentor’s u2u (user group) meeting and one of the keynotes was by Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx. The other was by Wally Rhines and is summarized here.
Ivo started off talking analogizing SoCs as the sports-cars of the industry (fast but expensive), and FPGAs as the station wagons (not cool). In fact he even said that when Xilinx… Read More
I was at Wally’s u2u (Mentor user group) keynote yesterday. The other keynote was by Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx and is here. He started off by looking at how the semiconductor industry has recovered and silicon area shipments are now back on trend after a pronounced drop in 2009 and revenue has followed. Finally the semiconductor… Read More
Power has become the strongest driver of semiconductor design today, more important than area, more important than timing. Whether the device is handheld, like a wireless phone, or tethered, like a router, complex power and energy requirements must be met. Shrinking geometries continue to impose new challenges as power management… Read More
Virtual platforms have been an area that has some powerful value propositions for both architectural analysis and for software development. But the fundamental weakness has been the modeling problem. People want fast and accurate models but this turns out to be a choice.
The first issue is that there is an unavoidable tradeoff… Read More
The IBM X-ForceTrend and Risk Report reveals how 2010 was a pivotal year for internet security as networks faced increasingly sophisticated attacks from malicious sources around the world. The X-Force reportedly monitors 13 billion real-time security events every day (150,000 events per second) and has seen an increase in … Read More
Inroduction
In the early days we made paper plots of an IC layout then measured the width and length of interconnect segments with a ruler to add up all of the squares, then multiplied by the resistance per square. It was tedious, error prone and took way too much time, but we were rewarded with accurate parasitic values for our SPICE… Read More
Yesterday at the Globalpress electronic summit Andrew gave an overview of the Apache product line, carefully avoiding saying anything he cannot due to the filing of Apache’s S-1. From a financial point of view the company has had 8 years of consecutive growth, is profitable since 2008, and has no debt. During 2010 when the… Read More
