Calibre DesignEnhancer Improves Power Management Faster and Earlier

Calibre DesignEnhancer Improves Power Management Faster and Earlier
by Mike Gianfagna on 09-05-2024 at 6:00 am

Calibre DesignEnhancer Improves Power Management Faster and Earlier

Anyone who has attempted to implement a custom design in an advanced process node knows that effective power management can be quite challenging. Effects such as voltage (IR) drop and electromigration (EM) can present significant headaches for both design teams and foundries. Optimizing layouts for these kinds of issues is … Read More


Agile Analog Visit at #60DAC

Agile Analog Visit at #60DAC
by Daniel Payne on 07-31-2023 at 10:00 am

agile analog 60dac min

Chris Morrison, Director of Product Marketing at Agile Analog met with me on the Tuesday at DAC this year, and I asked what has changed in the last year for their analog IP business. The short answer is that the company has initially built up foundation IP for Analog Mixed-Signal (AMS) uses, then recently added new IP for data conversion,… Read More


Calibre’s next move – Correct-by-Construction IC Layout Optimization

Calibre’s next move – Correct-by-Construction IC Layout Optimization
by Peter Bennet on 07-17-2023 at 10:00 am

DesignEnhancer

Siemens EDA’s next move in its Calibre shift left strategy is the addition of correct-by-construction IC layout optimization for the most critical emerging physical design challenges. Calibre’s new DesignEnhancer product supports both custom and digital ICs and is already in use by several leading IC design companies. It … Read More


Electromigration and IR Drop Analysis has a New Entrant

Electromigration and IR Drop Analysis has a New Entrant
by Daniel Payne on 09-28-2021 at 9:00 am

mPower capacity

My first IR drop analysis was back in the early 1980s at Intel, where I had to manually model the parasitics of the VDD and VSS interconnect for all of the IO cells that our team was designing in a graphics chip, then I ran that netlist in a SPICE simulator using transient analysis, measuring the bounce in VSS and droop in VDD levels as all… Read More


Reliability Analysis for Mission-Critical IC design

Reliability Analysis for Mission-Critical IC design
by Daniel Payne on 09-13-2021 at 10:00 am

reliability analysis min

Mission-critical IC design for segments like automotive, aerospace, defense, medical and 5G have more stringent reliability analysis requirements than consumer electronics, and entails running special simulations for the following concerns:

  • Electromigration analysis
  • IR drop analysis
  • MOS aging
  • High-sigma Monte Carlo
Read More

Webinar: Multicycle Vectorless Dynamic IR Signoff for Near 100 Percent Coverage

Webinar: Multicycle Vectorless Dynamic IR Signoff for Near 100 Percent Coverage
by Bernard Murphy on 09-18-2018 at 7:00 am

Check this webinar out – Mediatek will share a novel approach to early IR drop estimation. Competition in system design has become even more intense because potential markets are huge and there are more players with deep pockets chasing those markets. Wherever you are in those value chains, you want to shift everything left to accelerate… Read More


Integrity, Reliability Shift Left with ICC

Integrity, Reliability Shift Left with ICC
by Bernard Murphy on 06-26-2018 at 7:00 am

There is a nice serendipity in discovering that two companies I cover are working together. Good for them naturally but makes my job easier because I already have a good idea about the benefits of the partnership. Synopsys and ANSYS announced a collaboration at DAC 2017 for accelerating design optimization for HPS, mobile and automotive.… Read More


Foundry Partnership Simplifies Design for Reliability

Foundry Partnership Simplifies Design for Reliability
by Bernard Murphy on 06-14-2018 at 7:00 am

This builds on a couple of topics I have covered for quite a while from an analysis point of view – integrity and reliability. The power distribution network and some other networks like clock trees are particularly susceptible to both IR-drop and electromigration (EM) problems. The first can lead to intermittent timing failures,… Read More


Big Data Analytics and Power Signoff at NVIDIA

Big Data Analytics and Power Signoff at NVIDIA
by Bernard Murphy on 11-23-2017 at 7:00 am

While it’s interesting to hear a tool-vendor’s point of view on the capabilities of their product, it’s always more compelling to hear a customer/user point of view, especially when that customer is NVIDIA, a company known for making monster chips.


A quick recap on the concept. At 7nm, operating voltages are getting much closer… Read More


Silvaco Swallows Invarian

Silvaco Swallows Invarian
by Paul McLellan on 03-20-2015 at 7:00 am

Yesterday, Silvaco announced that it has acquired Invarian Inc. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Who is Invarian? They are a recognized leader in block-level to full-chip sign-off analysis for complex, high-performance ICs. Their unique methodology utilizes a parallel architecture and concurrent power-voltage-thermal… Read More