UPF was created to go beyond what HDL can do for managing on-chip power. HDLs are agnostic when it comes to dealing with supply & ground connections, power domains, level shifters, retention and other power management related elements of SoCs. UPF fills the breach allowing designers to specify in detail what parts of the design… Read More
All semiconductor design work today rests on the three-legged stool of Foundries, EDA Tools and Designers. Close collaboration between the three make possible the successful completion of ever more complex designs, especially those at advanced nodes. Perhaps one of the most critical intersections of all three is during physical… Read More
PCI Express (PCIe) has become an important communication element in a wide range of systems. It is used to connect networking, storage, FPGA and GPGPU boards to servers and desktop systems. It has progressed a long way from its initial parallel bus format. Its evolution to a serial point to point configuration has been accompanied… Read More
The most vexing problem for physical implementation engineers is debugging errors due to power-ground “shorts”, as reported by the layout-versus-schematic (LVS) physical verification flow. The number of polygons associated with each individual grid is large – an erroneous connection between grids results in a huge number… Read More
Design for test (DFT) requires a lot of up-front planning that can be difficult to alter if testing needs or performance differ from initial expectations. Hierarchical methodologies help in many ways including making it easier to reduce on chip resources such as the number of test signals. Also, hierarchical test allows for speed-ups… Read More
When Analog FastSPICE was first introduced in 2006 it changed the landscape for high performance SPICE simulation. During the last 14 years it has been used widely to verify advanced nanometer designs. Of course, since then the most advanced designs have progressed significantly, making verification even more difficult. Just… Read More
As if engineers did not have enough difficulty just getting everything right so that their designs are implemented functionally correct, the demands of lowering power consumption require changes that can affect functionality and verification. Techniques such as power gating, clock gating, mixed supply voltage, voltage … Read More
Over the years SerDes (serializer/deserializer) based connections have proliferated into just about every connection within and among computing systems. Years ago, parallel interfaces were the most common method of moving data, but issues of signal integrity, synchronization and power simply became too much for the required… Read More
There is an adage that says that quality is not something that can be slapped on at the end of the design or manufacturing process. Ensuring quality requires careful thought throughout development and production. Arguably this adage is more applicable to the topic of Design for Test (DFT) than almost any other area of IC development… Read More
Whenever I am asked to explain how chip design works by someone who is unfamiliar with the process, I struggle to explain the different steps in the flow. It also makes me aware of the discrete separations between each phase of activities. Of course, when you speak to a novice it is not even possible to get more than one layer down in the… Read More
