Wally Rhines’ keynote at U2U, the Mentor users’ group meeting, was about Mentor’s strategy of focusing on what other people don’t do. This is partially a defensive approach, since Mentor has never had the financial firepower to have the luxury of focusing all their development on sustaining their products and then make … Read More
Mentor’s U2U user group meeting in Santa Clara is next week on April 12th at the Santa Clara Marriott. For those of you on the east coast the Waltham U2U is on May 16th, and for Europeans the Munich U2U will be on October 25th. Registration is open for both Santa Clara and Waltham, and there is a call for papers for Munich.
The day … Read More
I went to a couple more sessions at the Common Platform Technology Forum today, on 20nm double patterning and whatever will we do at 14nm. Basically, this is the end of planar transistors and the end of optical lithography. One session was by IBM scientists about process and one by Michael White of Mentor about double patterning. … Read More
Next Wednesday is the Common Platform Technology Forum. “Common Platform” is a name that only a committee could have come up with, giving no clue as to what it actually is. As you probably know, there are various process clubs sharing the costs of technology development (TD) and one of them consists of IBM, Samsung and… Read More
This year’s CEO forecast panel was held at Silicon Valley Bank. Bankers live better than verification engineers, as if you didn’t know, based on the quality of the wine they were serving compared to DVCon.
This year the panelists were Ed Cheng from Gradient, Lip-Bu, Aart and Wally (and if you don’t know who they… Read More
I’ve read about MoSys over the years and had the chance this week to interview Nani Subraminian, Engineering Manager about the types of EDA tools that they use and how design data management has been deployed to keep the design process organized. My background includes both DRAM and SRAM design, so I’ve been curious… Read More
Advanced process technologies for manufacturing computer chips enable more functionality, higher performance, and low power through smaller sizes. Memory bits on a chip are predicted to double every two years to keep up with the demand for increased performance.
To meet these new requirements for performance and power, memory… Read More
Virtual fabric sounds like something that would be good for making the emperor’s new clothes. I talked today to Les Spruiell of Imera to find out what it really is.
Anyone who has worked as either a designer or as an EDA engineer has had the problem of a customer who has a problem but can’t send you the design since it is (a)… Read More
Verilog History
Prabhu Goel founded Gateway Design Automation and Phil Moorby wrote the Verilog language back in 1984. In 1989 Cadence acquired Gateway and Verilog grew into a de-facto HDL standard. I first met Prabu at Wang Labs in 1982 where I designed a rather untestable custom chip named the WL-2001 (yes, it was named to honor… Read More
AnSem has been in the AMS design business since 1998 and uses a variety of commercial EDA tools along with internally developed tools and scripts to automate the process of analog design and technology porting. Their IC designers have completed some 40 AMS projects in diverse areas like:
