IBM Tapes Out 14nm ARM Processor on Cadence Flow

IBM Tapes Out 14nm ARM Processor on Cadence Flow
by Paul McLellan on 10-30-2012 at 7:33 pm

An announcement at the ARM conference was of a joint project to tape out an ARM Cortex-M0 in IBM’s 14nm FinFET process. In fact they taped out 3 different versions of the chip using different routing architectures to see the impact on yield.

This was the first 14nm ARM tapeout, it seems. I’m sure Intel has built plenty … Read More


Jasper Property Synthesis Apps

Jasper Property Synthesis Apps
by Paul McLellan on 10-29-2012 at 7:00 am

Jasper restructured JasperGold so that it could deliver its formal technology more flexibly by having a base system and a porfolio of apps. This would also make it easier to upgrade capabilities by creating new apps. Today, Jasper announced two new apps:

  • JasperGold Structural Property Synthesis (SPS)
  • JasperGold Behavioral
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An AMS Reference Flow for Power Management Designs

An AMS Reference Flow for Power Management Designs
by Daniel Payne on 10-26-2012 at 5:42 pm

At DAC in June I visited and blogged about 30+ EDA and Semi IP companies, however I didn’t have time to watch the TowerJazz presentation in the Cadence Theater entitled: AMS Flow for Power Management Designs. Today I watched the 26 minute video and have summarized what I learned in this blog post.… Read More


CDNLive Call For Papers

CDNLive Call For Papers
by Paul McLellan on 10-24-2012 at 6:44 pm

The Silicon Valley CDNLive, the Cadence user conference, will be on March 12-13th 2013 in Santa Clara. But the heart of CDNLive are customer presentations and the call for papers is now open. The deadline is December 4th (at 5pm PST for people who really like to come down to the wire). At this point only an abstract is required.

There… Read More


The Auto Industry Speaks @ Renesas DevCon

The Auto Industry Speaks @ Renesas DevCon
by Holly Stump on 10-23-2012 at 9:00 pm


This year’s Renesas DevCon in Orange County, CA kicked off yesterday with an impressive lineup of speakers, record attendance, and an increased focus on automotive.

TheAuto Industry Speaks,” an Expert Panel organized by Martin Bakerof Renesas, featured:

  • Yoichi Yano, RenesasExecutive VP and Member of the Board, who early
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Power and Reliability Challenges

Power and Reliability Challenges
by Paul McLellan on 10-23-2012 at 12:38 pm

Last week I attended the Ansys/Apache seminars on “Dimensions of Electronic Design.” The two big challenges as we go down to 28nm and 20nm and below are keeping power manageable and keeping reliability up.

The big challenge with power is that we can put so much stuff on a die and clock it so fast that the power is exceeding… Read More


Intel Quarterly Report: Needs to Do Better

Intel Quarterly Report: Needs to Do Better
by Paul McLellan on 10-19-2012 at 11:51 am

Intel announced its quarterly results a couple of days ago. They had previously downgraded 3rd quarter sales estimates but they managed to beat the downgraded numbers. If you look at the transcript of the call (I didn’t listen live) you’ll see very little mention of mobile and Atom. This is bad news for Intel. Its core… Read More


A Brief History of Mobile: Generations 3 and 4

A Brief History of Mobile: Generations 3 and 4
by Paul McLellan on 10-18-2012 at 8:30 pm

The early first generation analog standards all used a technique known as Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA). All this means is that each call was assigned its own frequency band in the radio spectrum. Since each band was only allocated to one phone, there was no interference between different calls. When a call finished… Read More


Virtuoso Has Twins

Virtuoso Has Twins
by Paul McLellan on 10-18-2012 at 6:01 pm

Cadence has apparently announced that going forward the Virtuoso environment is going to be split into two and offered as two separate code-streams, the current IC6.x and a new IC12.x. The idea is to introduce a new product with features that were specifically developed for new technologies such as double patterning aware layout… Read More


Xilinx Programmable Packet Processor

Xilinx Programmable Packet Processor
by Paul McLellan on 10-17-2012 at 5:19 pm

At the Linley conference last week I ran into Gordon Brebner of Xilinx. He and I go a long way back. We had adjacent offices in Edinburgh University Computer Science Department back when we were doing our PhDs and conspiring to network the department’s Vax into the university network over a two-week vacation. We managed to … Read More