When I started in EDA the big three were Daisy, Mentor and Valid (DMV as we called them). Then came Synopsys in 1986 followed by Cadence, which was a clever merger between ECAD (Dracula DRC) and Solomon Design. Daisy and Valid were pushed aside and then there were, “Three dogs hovering over one bowl of dog food, not a pretty site.”… Read More
Pulsic recently announced its new “freemium” product Animate Preview and we had the chance to chat with Mark Williams, President and CEO of Pulsic. Mark explained details of the product and the new business model that could change the direction of the traditional EDA business model structure.
What brought you to the semiconductor… Read More
After an incredible year for SemiWiki I spent much of January breaking down 2020 with our sponsoring companies. Some had a down year, some had a flat year, but quite a few had remarkable years. One standout company is SmartDV which recorded a 51% revenue increase, so the important question is why?
Reasons:
SmartDV covers one of the… Read More
Electromagnetic (EM) simulations have been performed on die metal structures since the 1990s. Originally, the analysis was restricted to a single device (e.g., a spiral inductor). The number of on-die devices simulated simultaneously grew with the increasing capabilities of the computers performing the computations. This… Read More
I’ve been attending DAC since the late 1980’s and can tell you that it’s an annual highlight for me and anyone else interested in the EDA, IP and semiconductor industries. Where else can you see most of the big and little vendors of EDA software, semiconductor IP and foundries in one place? I recently blogged about… Read More
The design of an SRAM array requires focus on the key characteristics of readability, writeability, and read stability. As technology scaling has enabled the integration of large (cache) arrays on die, the sheer number of bitcells has necessitated a verification methodology that focuses on “statistical high-sigma” variation… Read More
The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating urgent demand for a new generation of analog/mixed-signal (AMS) designs, some of which also contain MEMs. To efficiently create the myriad of AMS devices at the edge of the IoT requires a design environment that is affordable and easy to use, but powerful enough to create the widely diverse… Read More
As I have mentioned before, Apple has changed the way we live on many different levels (iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, etc…) and the Apple Ax SoC series is no different. You have to ask yourself how is Apple able to churn out a new industry leading SoC EVERY year? I can assure you design reuse is a big part of that answer.
One of the companies… Read More
It’s a question that we ask all the time. How do I replace a door? How do I set up a printer? For most questions in today’s world, you can open a browser, type a question into your favorite search engine…and voilà, there you go! Ten seconds of typing, a few more sorting through the results, and you have an answer (or many answers!). This … Read More
In the 30+ years that I have worked in Silicon Valley I have seen many great products fail and even more mediocre products succeed, the difference being how the companies communicate to the outside world. In the semiconductor industry, presenting the value proposition of your company or product is under even more scrutiny now that… Read More
