Electrical Rule Checking and Exhaustive Classification of Errors

Electrical Rule Checking and Exhaustive Classification of Errors
by Daniel Payne on 04-16-2024 at 10:00 am

Aniah tool flow min

The goal of SoC design teams is to tape-out their project and receive working silicon on the first try, without discovering any bugs in silicon. To achieve this lofty goal requires all types of specialized checking and verification during the design phase to prevent bugs. There are checks at the system level, RTL level, gate level,… Read More


Schematic porting – the key to analog design reuse

Schematic porting – the key to analog design reuse
by Tom Simon on 04-02-2018 at 12:00 pm

At the beginning of every project the one of the first questions that ought to be asked is whether there blocks from previous designs that can be reused. On the surface this seems pretty obvious. The wrinkle in this is that reusability varies a lot based on the design type and the effort that a team is willing to expend to bring a design… Read More


Seeking Solution for Saving Schematics?

Seeking Solution for Saving Schematics?
by Tom Simon on 11-24-2017 at 7:00 am

Schematics are still the lynchpin of analog design. In the time that HDL’s have revolutionized digital design, schematics have remained drawn and used much as they have been for decades. While the abstraction of HDL based designs has made process and foundry porting relatively straightforward, porting schematic based designs… Read More


Making Things Visible for 25 Years

Making Things Visible for 25 Years
by Paul McLellan on 06-03-2015 at 7:00 am

This year is most notably the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law. It is also the 25th anniversary of Concept Engineering. They were founded in 1990 in Freiburg Germany. They started by providing automatic schematic generation from netlist. They sold primarily to other EDA companies and to internal development groups in semiconductor… Read More


Starvision Pro: Lattice Semiconductor’s Experience

Starvision Pro: Lattice Semiconductor’s Experience
by Paul McLellan on 04-09-2015 at 7:00 am

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


Concept: From Schematics to Debug

Concept: From Schematics to Debug
by Paul McLellan on 02-05-2015 at 7:00 am

In the late 1990s I was the VP Engineering at Ambit Design Systems. We had a synthesis product (called BuildGates, nobody ever forgot the name). Both our own engineers and our customers wanted to be able to take a look at the gate-level netlist that was generated from their RTL. We used a product from a company called Concept Engineering… Read More


Expert Tool to Easily Debug RTL and Reuse in SoCs

Expert Tool to Easily Debug RTL and Reuse in SoCs
by Pawan Fangaria on 12-16-2014 at 7:00 pm

SoC design these days has become a complex and tricky phenomenon involving integration of multiple IPs and legacy RTL code which could be in different languages, sourced from various third parties across the globe. Understanding and reusing RTL code is imperative in SoC integration which needs capable tools that can accommodate… Read More


Complete SoC Debugging & Integration in a Single Cockpit

Complete SoC Debugging & Integration in a Single Cockpit
by Pawan Fangaria on 11-15-2014 at 10:00 am

These days it’s common to expect large digital designs, analog blocks, custom IPs, glue logic, interfaces and interconnects all developed separately, perhaps by different vendors / teams, but integrated together in a single environment forming an SoC. The SoC can have multiple clock domains and can work in multiple modes of … Read More


StarVision to Debug and Analyze Designs at All Levels

StarVision to Debug and Analyze Designs at All Levels
by Pawan Fangaria on 10-09-2014 at 4:00 pm

In today’s SoC world where multiple analog and digital blocks along with IPs at different levels of abstractions are placed together on a single chip, debugging at all levels becomes quite difficult and clumsy. While one is working at the top level and needs to investigate a particular connection at an intermediate hierarchical… Read More


Expert Tool to View and Debug Design Issues at Spice Level

Expert Tool to View and Debug Design Issues at Spice Level
by Pawan Fangaria on 09-12-2014 at 7:00 am

Spice view of a design, block or fragment of the design is probably the lowest level of functional description of a circuit in terms of transistors, resistors, capacitors, interconnect and so on, which in several ways acts as an ultimate proof of pudding for any semiconductor design before manufacturing. However, it’s generally… Read More