Semiconductor manufacturing equipment has returned to growth after a falloff in the second half of 2011. Combined data from SEMI (U.S. andEuropean companies) and SEAJ (Japanese companies) show billings peaked at a three-month-average of $3.2 billion in May 2011. Bookings and billings began todrop in June 2011, with billings… Read More
So DAC is over and you are no longer thinking about the features and benefits of new tools or even the tools that you already own. But once you have lots of tools then you need to worry about how to use them efficiently.
But here are three things that you need to worry about to get the most out of your EDA investment:
Kathryn Kranen, CEO of Jasper was elected chairman of EDAC for 2012-2014. She has has 20 years EDA industry. She started her career as a design engineer at Rockwell International and then joined Daisy Systems (one of the DMV, the second generation of EDA companies). She then moved to be VP of North American sales at Quickturn (emulation)… Read More
I met Sam Appleton of Ausdia during DAC. I found it quite hard to understand exactly what they do. I’ve talked before about something that I nick-named City Slickers’ Marketing. It is named after the following exchange from the movie City Slickers:Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? [holds up one finger] This.… Read More
There are only a handful of billion transistor IC designs in existence today, so when an EDA company touts 1 trillion transistor IC layout editing then I take notice. This year at DAC I met with Katherine Hayes and Karen Mangum of Micro Magic to get an update on their IC layout tools.… Read More
I first heard about SPICE Vision Pro when working at Mentor Graphics where we needed a way to visualize SPICE netlists and debug SPICE simulation results node by node on a design where we didn’t have the original schematics. Last Monday I met the engineers from Concept Engineering in their booth at DAC to get an update, Gerhard… Read More
Mark Twain remarked that everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. 3D ICs seems to be a bit like that. Over the last couple of years there have been lots of people talking about 3D but very little that has actually been manufactured. In addition to the weather, everyone talks about Xilinx’s 3D Virtex… Read More
The way that the press that covers EDA has changed in the last few years is quite dramatic. Semiwiki is, of course, part of that change. The official press is less and less relevant and bloggers and newsletters are more and more important.… Read More
Before this DAC I had never even heard of ICScape, so on Monday and Wednesday I visited their booth to find out their story.
Steve Yang, Ph.D. (Co-founder and President), Ravi Ravikumar (Marketing)
ICScape was founded in 2005 in Santa Clara by Steve Yang (Circuit Design engineer for microprocessor, Synopsys) and Jason Xing (Sun… Read More
Britto Vincent of ProPlus Design Solutions met with me at DAC on Monday morning to talk about Design For Yield (DFY) and Analog Fast SPICE.
In 2011 ProPlus announced DFY tools where the technology came from IBM, it provides fast Monte Carlo results up to 3 sigma, then added NanoSpice for faster simulation results. Similar in approach… Read More
