A new term has entered the vernacular of electronic design engineering — pathfinding. The complexity of the functionality to be integrated and the myriad of chip, package, and board technologies available make the implementation decision a daunting task. Pathfinding refers to the method by which the design space of technology… Read More
James Clerk Maxwell’s eponymous equations are the basis for simulating electromagnetic wave propagation. In school, EE majors tended to fall into two camps: (a) those that thoroughly enjoyed their fields and waves classes, who liked doing surface integrals, and who were adept at demonstrating the “right hand rule”, and (b) … Read More
DesignCon is a unique conference — its tagline is “Where the Chip meets the Board”. Held each January in Santa Clara, the conference showcases a wealth of new technologies for advanced packaging, printed circuit board fabrication, connectors, cables, and related analysis equipment (e.g, BERT, VNA, scopes). Of specific… Read More
In the wake of increased global competitiveness and shorter time-to-market windows, there has been a renewed focus by design management on the underlying data management infrastructure of the design teams. An increasing number of systems-on-chip (SoCs) now have some type of analog, digital and/or RF modules, making it imperative… Read More
There’s a small art gallery near the office. It features a new set of paintings by a local artist every two weeks. As I walk by I tend to check out what’s hanging in there. Sometimes I turn up my nose at what I see – a bit too wacky, a bit too abstract, a bit too paint by numbers. Sometimes I walk in to take a closer look but leave the shop empty-handed… Read More
For the last several years, people have predicted the end of Moore’s Law. The reasoning is that there is a limit at which one can’t shrink transistors any further. A reoccurring comment has been “You can’t divide an atom.” I had assumed that its demise would be at the hands of a new paradigm like quantum computing. Now, with Intel’s … Read More
Japanese stood to be the world leaders during 1980-1990 regime in semiconductor manufacturing[SUP] [2][/SUP]. During my research, I found that Japanese semiconductor firms are very strong leaders in process which gave them a competitive advantage over others. Situation is bit different today, as we have fabless firms taking… Read More
I love reading about good news in the EDA and Semiconductor IP space, especially in light of the recent stock market trending downward in January. The best news that I’ve read in the past week is about the Q3 2015 revenue numbers collected by EDAC, because it shows that Semiconductor IP (SIP) surpassed CAE tool revenues for … Read More
Looking back, 2015 was a significant year for mergers and acquisitions in the EDA industry. The Semiwiki team maintains a chronology of major transactions here.
As I was reviewing this compendium, one of the entries that stands out is the acquisition of Apache Design Solutions by Ansys, Inc. a couple of years ago.
At that time, there… Read More
In Orion Bytes we use Tcl both for the internal research, product and different verification services. We use also SystemVerilog UVM and Python based Cocotb for different approaches. I think it’s no need to deep into the SystemVerilog and UVM principles here – today’s main verification fashion is well described through… Read More
