SoC’s are now dominated by IP blocks sourced either from 3rd parties or internal design teams. This means that IP is now critical to the success of the SoC, yet it is part of the design that teams have the least control over, or visibility into. Most design teams utilize at best ad-hoc methods to manage this IP, and the few that utilize… Read More
EDA and Semiconductor companies are offering new webinars almost every week of the year, so there’s always something worth learning about that only takes an hour of time. On November 5th there’s an interesting webinar planned on the topic of IP Lifecycle Management, hosted by Methodics. I blogged two weeks ago about,… Read More
It’s common to see an SoC with a few hundred IP blocks today, which is quite a change from full-custom IC designs developed in the early days (i.e. 1980’s) where there was little IP re-use at all. This shift in the technology and business of IP has created a relatively new industry of IP providers from small to large in size.… Read More
Eric Peersfounded Missing Link tools in 2008 and his company was acquiredby Methodics in 2012, so I met with him at DAC to understand how their EDA tools for Design, Test and Regression Management are used in an SoC design.
Eric Peers, Methodics… Read More
In a typical analog IC design team, multiple engineers and layout professionals work on cells and libraries. At various points during the design process they will commit changes to their designs into the Design Management (DM) system that manages their files – be it Subversion, Perforce or some other commercial tool.
Using the… Read More
This list was compiled by the SemiWiki bloggers highlighting emerging technologies that we have written about and that will be demonstrated at the Design Automation Conference next week. We highly recommend you investigate them further during your time in Austin and please let us know what you think.
Today SemiWiki has more than… Read More
Two weeks ago I blogged about analog verification and it started a discussion with 16 comments, so l’ve found that our readers have an interest in this topic. For decades now the Digital IC design community has used and benefited from regression testing as a way to measure both design quality and progress, ensuring that first… Read More
Methodics is new to SemiWiki and I have to tell you I’m really enjoying working with them. Their office is in a great location and the inovation spirit runs strong. Simon Butler is an interesting guy. He first started in EDA with HLD (acquired by Cadence) and was a founder at Sabio Labs (acquired by Magma). In between those startups… Read More
Analog design seems to suffer from a huge gap when it comes to testing and verification. While some of this gap is natural – after all, often the only way to verify whether a particular design is working is to look at actual simulation waveforms – it still seems like a lot can be done to bring process into this sphere of the… Read More
Methodics was founded in 2006 by 2 ex-Cadence experts in the Custom IC design tools space, Simon Butler and Fergus Slorach. They had a consulting company called IC Methods, active in Silicon Valley from 2000-2006, and when they needed to create a new company to service a consulting engagement that had turned into a product, they … Read More
