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Solving and Simulating in the New Virtuoso RF Solution

Solving and Simulating in the New Virtuoso RF Solution
by Tom Simon on 10-30-2018 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Cadence, EDA

Cadence has done a good job of keeping up with the needs of analog RF designs. Of course, the term RF used to be reserved for a thin slice of designs that were used specifically in RF applications. Now, it covers things like SerDes for networking chips that have to operate in the gigahertz range. Add that to the trend of combining RF and… Read More

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Essential Analog IP for 7nm and 5nm at TSMC OIP

Essential Analog IP for 7nm and 5nm at TSMC OIP
by Tom Simon on 10-24-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Events, Foundries, IP, Silicon Creations, TSMC

When TSMC’s annual Open Innovation Platform Exposition takes place, you know it will be time to hear about designs starting on the most advanced nodes. This year we were hearing about 7nm and 5nm. These newer nodes present even more challenges than previous nodes due to many factors. Regardless of what kind of design you are undertaking… Read More

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When FPGA Design Looks More Like ASIC Design

When FPGA Design Looks More Like ASIC Design
by Bernard Murphy on 06-08-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, FPGA, Synopsys

I am sure there are many FPGA designers who are quite content to rely on hardware vendor tools to define, check, implement and burn their FPGAs, and who prefer to test in-system to validate functionality. But that approach is unlikely to work when you’re building on the big SoC platforms – Zynq, Arria and even the big non-SoC devices.… Read More

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Innovation in a Commodity Market

Innovation in a Commodity Market
by Bernard Murphy on 05-29-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Cadence, EDA

Logic simulation is a victim of its own success. It has been around for at least 40 years, has evolved through multiple language standards and has seen significant advances in performance and major innovations in testbench standards. All that standardization and performance improvement has been great for customers but can present… Read More

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Converter Circuit Optimization Gets Powerful New Tool

Converter Circuit Optimization Gets Powerful New Tool
by Tom Simon on 05-09-2018 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA, Magwel, Mobile

DC converter circuit efficiency can have a big effect on the battery life of mobile devices. It also can affect power efficiency for wall-power operated circuits. Even before parasitics are factored in, converter circuit designers have a lot of issues to contend with. Optimizing circuit operation is essential for giving consumers… Read More

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Another Application of Automated RTL Editing

Another Application of Automated RTL Editing
by Bernard Murphy on 03-13-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: Defacto Technologies, EDA
1 Comment

DeFacto and their STAR technology are already quite well known among those who want to procedurally apply edits to system-level RTL. I’m not talking here about the kind of edits you would make with your standard edit tools. Rather these are the more convoluted sort of changes you might attempt with Perl (or perhaps Python these days).… Read More

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Unexpected Help for Simulation from Machine Learning

Unexpected Help for Simulation from Machine Learning
by Tom Simon on 02-13-2018 at 12:00 pm
Categories: AI, EDA, Events, Synopsys

I attend a lot of events on machine learning and write about it regularly. However, I learned some exciting new information about machine learning in a very surprising place recently. Every year for the last few years I have attended the HSPICE SIG dinner hosted by Synopsys in Santa Clara. This event starts with a vendor fair featuring… Read More

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Simulation and Formal – Finding the Right Balance

Simulation and Formal – Finding the Right Balance
by Bernard Murphy on 01-23-2018 at 7:00 am
Categories: ARM, Cadence, EDA

Simulation dominates hardware functional verification today and likely will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile formal verification, once thought to be a possible challenger for the title, has instead converged on a more effective role as a complement to simulation. Formal excels at finding problems… Read More

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Webinar: Fast-Track to Riviera-PRO

Webinar: Fast-Track to Riviera-PRO
by Bernard Murphy on 08-11-2017 at 7:00 am
Categories: Aldec, EDA, FPGA

Whether you’re right out of college, starting on your first design, a burn-and-churn designer thinking there must be a better way or an ASIC designer wanting to do a little prototyping, this webinar may be for you. It’s a fast start on using the Aldec Riviera-PRO platform for verification setup, run and debug, and more. There are … Read More

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Polishing Parallelism

Polishing Parallelism
by Bernard Murphy on 05-11-2017 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, Synopsys

The great thing about competition in free markets is that vendors are always pushing their products to find an edge. You the consumer don’t have to do much to take advantage of these advances (other than possibly paying for new options). You just sit back and watch the tool you use get faster and deliver better QoR. You may think that… Read More