With every process node and every SOC design, engineering and IT teams are experiencing an unprecedented data explosion. User workspaces routinely exceed 10’s of GB and sometimes even 100’s of GB. Regression runs, characterization runs, design and debug of workspaces, building verification environments – all of these… Read More
Daniel Nenni was gracious enough to encourage me to conduct a brief webinar describing a new reference text, recently published by Prentice-Hall, part of the Semiwiki Webinar Series.
VLSI DESIGN Methodology Development Webiner Replay
Background
I was motivated to write the text to provide college students with a broad background… Read More
The rising complexity of modern SoC designs, as enabled by progressing manufacturing technology, leads to an increasing validation challenge as the only way to manage complexity increase is by re-using more pre-designed IP blocks. These IP-blocks are provided by various suppliers such as a foundry partner, internal design… Read More
The recent Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas was an indication of how the electronics industry is evolving. In its formative years, DAC was focused on the fundamental algorithms emerging from academic research and industrial R&D, that enabled the continuation of the Moore’s Law complexity curve. (Indeed, the… Read More
Aristotle once said “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. The notion of synergism echoes the importance of leveraging design IPs to the maximum extent with the rest of the system under development, in order to ensure a successful SoC design outcome in a shorter development cycle.
SoC design cost and entry point
For over… Read More
One of the more interesting markets that I cover is FPGA Prototyping. Interesting because it is fast growing ($150-250M) and interesting because it is all about design starts and design starts are the lifeblood of the semiconductor industry.
If you are interested in FPGA prototyping you might want to start with the 30+ S2C Inc blogs… Read More
According to a recent engineering survey, completing IC designs on time and within specifications gets exponentially more challenging with each node. Why? Here are the top five reasons:… Read More
If you are designing chips in a competitive market with multiple design teams and IP reuse is a high priority then you probably already know about the ClioSoft SOS Platform. What you probably did not know however is how well they are doing with the re-architected version of their integrated design and IP management software.
We have… Read More
Last month, I made a “no-brainer” forecast that 2017 would be the year in which embedded FPGA (eFPGA) IP would emerge as a key differentiator for new SoC designs (link to the earlier article here).
The fusion of several technical and market factors are motivating design teams to incorporate programmable logic functionality… Read More
Fractal is another one of those very successful emerging EDA companies that you don’t read a lot about, except on SemiWiki. Rene Donkers is co-founder and CEO of Fractal Technologies, a company addressing IP quality assurance. This is a niche in the SoC tooling market that deserves some justification. Why not use an IP as-is… Read More
