EDA industry pundit Gary Smithhas been talking about the electronics industry adopting an ESL tool flow for decades, so it was my pleasure to speak with Bill Neifertof Carbon Design Systemsat DAC this month because his company has been offering both tools and models that enable a virtual prototyping design flow.… Read More
Tag: simulation
Real FPGAs don’t eat fake test vectors
Vector blasting hardware is as old as digital test methodology itself. In the days of relatively simple combinational and finite state machine logic, a set of vectors aimed broadside at inputs could shake loose most faults with observable outputs. With FPGAs, creating an effective set of artificial test vectors has become a lot… Read More
Teach Yourself Silvaco
In the dim and distant past, if you wanted to learn how to use a particular EDA tool then you would go on a training course. This would often be multiple days and often a significant dollar investment too. For most EDA companies, that option still exists and the big 3 have quite extensive training catalogs.
But nowadays it is often easier… Read More
LSI’s Way of Faster & Reliable Electronic System Design
LSI Corporationstarted in 1980s and I had several encounters with it during my jobs in 1990s; not to forget the LSI chips I used to see in desktops and other electronic systems, and I’m happy to see LSI continuing today with more vigour having leadership position in storage and networking space. It provides highly reliable, high … Read More
A Brief History of Functional Verification
Usually these brief history pieces are totally written by the SemiWiki blogger whose name is at the top. Often me since that was how I prototyped book chapters (buy). Well, OK, I did actually write this but it is completely cribbed from a presentation earlier this week by Wally Rhines who gave a sort of keynote at the announcement of… Read More
Key Ingredients for ESL Power Modeling, Simulation, Analysis and Optimzations
There’s a French EDA company named DOCEA Powerthat is uniquely focused on power analysis at the ESL level and I had a chance to interview Ridha Hamza to get new insight on ESL design challenges and their approach. Ridha started out doing SRAM design at STMicroelectornics in the 1990’s, moved into the emerging field … Read More
Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler
Integration is often an underrated attribute of good tools, compared to raw performance and technology. But these days integration is differentiation (try telling that to your calculus teacher). Today at DVCon Synopsys announced Verification Compiler which integrates pretty much all of Synopsys’s verification technologies… Read More
Before SPICE Circuit Simulation Comes TCAD Tools
I’ve run SPICE circuit simulators since the 1970’s and they use transistor models where the device parameters are provided by the foundry. These transistor and interconnect parameters come from an engineer at the foundry who has characterized silicon with actual measurements or by running a TCAD (Technology CAD)… Read More
I switched to Aldec Active-HDL
I have written this before, but I was a ModelSim snob. That has changed after trying Active-HDL from Aldec. I have no plans on going back to ModelSim. You ask why? Well astute reader, great question. Unfortunately these blogs are text limited and there is no way to write about all the bells and whistles of Active-HDL. So before I continue,… Read More
Simulation of Novel TFT Devices
Traditionally logic devices built on top of thin-film-transistors (TFTs) have used one type of device, either an NMOS a-Si: TFT (hydrogenated amorphous silicon) or a PMOS organic device. Recently a-Si:H and pentacene PMOS TFTs have been integrated into complementary logic structures similar to CMOS. This, in turn, creates… Read More