Atrenta: Mentor/Spyglass Power Signoff…and a Book

Atrenta: Mentor/Spyglass Power Signoff…and a Book
by Paul McLellan on 05-30-2013 at 7:00 am

Today Atrenta and Mentor announced that they were collaborating to enable accurate, signoff quality power estimation at the RTL for entire SoCs. The idea is to facilitate RTL power estimation for designs of over 50M gates running actual software loads over hundreds of millions of cycles, resulting in simulation datasets in the… Read More


RTL Signoff Theater

RTL Signoff Theater
by Paul McLellan on 05-29-2013 at 11:00 am

We have talked for years about RTL signoff, the idea that a design could be finalized at the RTL level and then most of the signoff would take place there. Then the design would be passed to a physical implementation team who would not expect to run into any problems (such as routing congestion, missing the power budget or similar problems).… Read More


Tempus: Cadence Takes On PrimeTime

Tempus: Cadence Takes On PrimeTime
by Paul McLellan on 05-20-2013 at 7:00 am

Today Cadence announced Tempus, their new timing signoff solution. This has been in development for at least a couple of years and has been built from the ground up to be massively parallelized. Not just that different corners can be run in parallel (which is basically straightforward) but that large designs can be partitioned … Read More


Power, Signal, Thermal and EMI signoff

Power, Signal, Thermal and EMI signoff
by Paul McLellan on 08-28-2012 at 1:55 pm

Increasingly the challenge with SoCs, especially for mobile, is not getting the performance high enough but doing so in a power-efficient manner. Handheld devices running multiple apps need high-speed processors that consume extremely low levels of power both in operating and standby modes. In the server farm, the limit is … Read More