Digital designers are more numerous than analog IC designers, and so they tend to get more attention from EDA vendors in terms of tools and automation methodologies. For an analog design team with specialists focused separately on schematics and layout there are several methodology questions that need to be addressed, like:… Read More
Most IC designs are developed by a team of professionals, often separated into distinct groups like front-end and back-end, logical and physical designers. Circuit designers use tools like schematic capture at the transistor-level to create a topology, then begin simulating the netlist with a SPICE simulator. Layout designers… Read More
As a blogger I have the privilege of meeting many IC designers from around the world, mostly through contact on LinkedIn or from connecting at trade shows. Through a contact at DACI met up with Achim Graupner, a manager of methodology and design automation from ZMDI, then asked him for an interview to understand how his group does … Read More
There’s much talk in EDA about High Level Synthesis (HLS), Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) and the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), however there’s a lower-level of abstraction, the transistor-level, where high-speed digital cell libraries are created, analog circuits are crafted, and AMS designers… Read More
When I upgraded cars from a 1988 to 1998 Acura it seemed like my car had become much smarter with a security chip in the key, security codes in the radio and a connector for computer diagnosis, however in today’s modern auto there’s a lot more mixed-signal design content. Micronasand Synopsysgot together and hosted … Read More
Electro Static Discharge (ESD) is a fact of life for IC designs and has been ever since electronics were first created and then started failing because of sudden, large currents flowing through the design caused by human, processing or machine contact. It’s just too expensive to layout an IC today, fabricate it, test for … Read More
Digital designers have used logic optimization and logic synthesis for decades as a means to produce more optimal designs with EDA tools. On the analog and transistor-level side of design the efforts to automatically optimize for speed or power have generally been limited to circuits with only a handful of transistors. These … Read More
Learning an HDL language or an HDL simulator are two different things, so I wanted to see what was available for learning a vendor-specific HDL simulator. I’ve already taught Verilog as an instructor using both ModelSim and Active-HDL simulators, however we only used a handful of commands in the class and labs in order to … Read More
Most IC engineers learn best by hands-on experience when another more experienced person can show us what to do. If you cannot find that experienced person, then the next best thing is a video from an expert. I was surprised to find out that video was so important today that the #2 most viewed web site on the Internet was www.youtube.com… Read More
IC designers use EDA tools to implement their logical and physical design, and these tools require foundry-specific information for:
