The fabless movement was instrumental in disaggregating the semiconductor industry. Vertical product development at the chip and system level has given way to a horizontal structure over the years. This organization of product development has been doing an admirable job of delivering extremely reliable products. However… Read More
I recall back in the late 1980’s when logic synthesis tools were first commercialized, at first they could read in a gate-level netlist from one foundry then output an optimized netlist back into the same foundry. Next, they could migrate your gate-level netlist from Vendor A over to Vendor B, giving design companies some… Read More
Just prior to the opening of the 54[SUP]th[/SUP] Design Automation Conference, Mentor, a Siemens company, and PhoeniX Software issued a press release announcing a new integration between their tools to help designers of photonic ICs (PICs) to close the loop for manufacturing sign-off verification. This is a significant piece… Read More
As the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunities continues to expand, companies are working hard to bring System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions to market in the hopes of garnering market share and revenue. However, it’s not as easy as it may first seem. Companies are running into a series of issues that stand between them and capturing the… Read More
It seems like I have written a lot about SRAM lately. Let’s face it SRAM is important – it often represents large percentages of the area on SOC’s. As such, SRAM yield plays a major role in determining overall chip yields. SRAM is vulnerable to defect related failures, which unlike variation effects are not Gaussian in nature. Fabrication… Read More
In the wake of the many mega mergers and consolidation in the semiconductor and electronics space, it is easy to say that opportunities for smaller companies are shrinking. Indeed, quite the opposite might be true. The larger companies, like Broadcom, ARM, Qualcomm, Analog Devices, Microchip, Maxim and Infineon (to name a few)… Read More
My first exposure to running something virtual on a computer was when I decided to run the Windows OS on my MacBook Pro using software provided by Parallels. With that virtualization I was able to run the Quicken app under Windows on my MacBook Pro, along with the popular Internet Explorer web browser. The app performance on virtualized… Read More
Processor cores come in a wide variety of speeds, performance and capabilities, so it may take you some time to find the proper processor for your system. Let’s say that you are designing a product for the industrial, automotive, military or medical markets that has an inherent requirement for safety, security and reliability… Read More
When the topic of hardware emulation comes up, thoughts of big iron customarily come to mind. However, hardware emulation has evolved significantly and now there are other important traits that distinguish the offerings in this area. For a very long period of time emulators provided primarily a method to accelerate gate level… Read More
Some time ago I wrote a DeepChip viewpoint on DVCON 2014 in which I praised a Mentor paper “Of Camels and Committees”. The authors argued that while the UVM standards committee had a done a great job in the early releases, the 1.2 release was overloaded with nice-to-have features with questionable value for a standard, particularly… Read More
