Pressing demands on compute speeds, storage capacity and rapid access to data are not new to the semiconductor industry. A desire for access to on-demand computing resources have always been there. During pre-cloud-computing era, companies provisioned on-demand compute capacity by procuring high performance computing … Read More
Although electronic systems design as a discipline has been around ever since electronics systems came into existence (and that was many decades ago), the design complexities involved and the demands and constraints placed on the systems have multiplied significantly since then. Recent research by LifeCycle Insights shows… Read More
UPF was created to go beyond what HDL can do for managing on-chip power. HDLs are agnostic when it comes to dealing with supply & ground connections, power domains, level shifters, retention and other power management related elements of SoCs. UPF fills the breach allowing designers to specify in detail what parts of the design… Read More
Introduction
For many years, I pondered the ultimate future of EDA. Companies such as Oracle, SAP and Dassault provide a huge array of enabling software infrastructure for the enterprise, including product design, mechanical design, project management and materials sourcing. But not for the all-important tasks of chip and… Read More
Electronic design automation has evolved to an extent that the complex chips with tens of billions of transistors frequently produce first pass functional prototypes from the manufacturer. What makes this so incredible is that such a small portion of the possible states of electronic operation are actually tested in the simulation… Read More
Executives from the major EDA companies attend the Design Automation Conference to introduce new product features, describe new initiatives and collaborations, meet with customers, and participate in lively conference panel discussions. Daniel Nenni and I were fortunate to be able to meet with Joe Sawicki, Executive Vice… Read More
Ever since the early days of computing there has always been a large distinction between ‘regular’ computing and real time computing – where special care had to be made to deal with unordered and asynchronous events. Back then a system typically consisted of a handful of sensors and perhaps some electromechanical devices.… Read More
Over the last six years EDA has experienced yet another disruption not unlike the Synopsys acquisition of Avant! in 2001 which positioned Synopsys for the EDA lead they still enjoy today. Or the hiring of famed venture capitalist Lip-Bu Tan in 2009 to be the CEO of struggling EDA pioneer Cadence Design Systems. Under Lip-Bu’s… Read More
What started as blogs, or vignettes as Wally calls them, posted on SemiWiki is now a free PDF eBook. The journey starts with his school days at Stanford through 20+ years at TI and 24+ years at Mentor Graphics. Wally has traveled millions of miles meeting with every customer imaginable while presenting hundreds of different keynotes… Read More
There was an interesting keynote at DVCon last month. It was titled “Thriving in the Age of Digitalization” which introduced the concept of digital twins for design and production. It was presented by Fram Akiki who is a relative newcomer to EDA but has an interesting history so I will start there.
Fram and I got started in the semiconductor… Read More
