It’s been the case most of the time that until we hit a bottleneck situation, we do not realize that our focus is not at the right spot. Similar is the case with power analysis at the SoC level. Power has become equally if not more important than the functionality and other parameters of an SoC, and therefore has to be verified earlier … Read More
Last month in DAC I could see some of the top innovations in the EDA world. EDA is a key enabler for advances in semiconductor designs. Among a number of innovations worth mentioning (about which I blogged just after DAC), the integration of Mentor’s Veloce with ANSYS’ PowerArtist for power analysis of live applications caught my… Read More
As the number of CPU, GPU, and IP is growing in an SoC, power management is becoming more and more a complex task in itself. A single tool or methodology may not be enough for complete power management and verification of an SoC. In an SoC, there can be multiple modes of operations involving hardware and software interactions, different… Read More
Only one company at the recent DAC conference and exhibit had a set of four interacting disciplines: Fluids, Structures, Electronics and Systems. Did you guess that the company was ANSYS? I get so IC focused at times that I almost forget that chips plug into boards, that boards become systems, and that systems drive and control mechanical… Read More
The SoC design teams are usually divided between front-end and back-end specialties. It is neither practical nor advisable to combine the two teams in order to better tackle the back-end issues upfront during the front-end design. However, a common problem is that the issues at the layout stage have very little scope for resolution… Read More
A week ago I was reading an article written by Daniel Nenni where he emphasised about semiconductor acquisitions to fuel innovation. We would see that in a larger space, not only in semiconductor and FPGA manufacturing companies (e.g. Intel and Altera) but also in the whole semiconductor ecosystem. If we see it from technical perspective,… Read More
Combine the pressures of Moore’s Law which enable billion transistor SoCs and the shortened time to market from consumer electronics product cycles and you have the perfect storm for EDA tool vendors. A modern SoC can have 500 or more blocks, creating both a design and verification challenge. How in the world do you write … Read More
With the increase in SoC designs’ sizes and complexities, the verification continuum has grown larger to an extent that the strategies for design convergence need to be applied from the very beginning of the design flow. Often designers are stuck with never ending iterations between RTL, gate and transistor levels at different… Read More
Often we hear about isolated instances of excellence from various companies in the semiconductor industry which contribute significantly in building the overall ecosystem. While the individual excellence is essential, it’s rather more important how that excellence is utilized in a larger way by the industry to create a ‘value… Read More
During SNUG I took the opportunity to chat to Choon-Hoe Yeoh of Lattice Semiconductor about how they use Concept Engineering’s Starvision Pro product. He is the senior director of EDA tools and methodologies there.
Lattice Semiconductor is a manufacturer of low-power, small-footprint, low-cost programmable logic devices.… Read More
