By Bhanu Pandey
The semiconductor industry is currently facing a significant challenge in functional verification. According to the most recent Wilson Research Group / Siemens EDA Functional Verification Study, first-silicon success rates have hit a historic low, with nearly 68% of designs requiring two or more spins. While… Read More
The semiconductor industry creates increasingly complex SoC and chiplets using lots of IP and all of that IP needs to be characterized at the cell level. As we design with 3nm and 2nm nodes, the sheer volume of data required for accurate static timing analysis (STA) is greatly increasing. Modern design flows rely on characterized… Read More
Custom IC design has demanding technical requirements to produce accurate simulation results for timing and power analysis in the shortest run times. EDA vendors have been rushing to use AI and ML technology to meet these analysis requirements. I attended a webinar from Siemens on accelerating iterative design cycles with Solido… Read More
High-speed signals enable electronic systems by using memory interfaces, SerDes channels, data center backplanes and connectivity in automobiles. Challenges arise from signal distortions like inter-symbol interference, channel loss and dispersion effects. Multi-gigabit data transfer rates in High-Bandwidth Memory… Read More
A familiar face in EDA, Greg Lebsack met with me in the Empyrean booth at DAC this year on opening day to provide an update on what’s new. I first met Greg when he was at Tanner EDA, then Mentor and Siemens EDA, so he really knows our industry quite well. The company was a Silver level sponsor of DAC this year, and Empyrean offers tools for… Read More
Transistor-level circuit designers have long used SPICE for circuit simulation, mostly because it is silicon accurate and helps them to predict the function, timing, power, waveforms, slopes and delays in a cell before fabrication. RTL designers use digital simulators that have a huge capacity but are lacking analog modeling.… Read More
Digital logic chips synchronize all logic operations by using a clock signal connected to flip-flops or latches, and the clock is distributed across the entire chip. The ultimate goal is to have a clock signal that arrives at the exact same moment in time at all clocked elements. If the clock arrives too early or too late from the PLL… Read More
Can you name the EDA vendor that first used AI starting 15 years ago for circuit designers using SPICE simulators? I can remember that vendor, it was Solido, now part of Siemens EDA, and I just read their 8 page paper on how they look at the various levels of AI being used in EDA to help IC designers work smarter and faster than using manual… Read More
Analog IC designers can spend way too much time and effort re-using old, familiar, manual iteration methods for circuit design, just because that’s the way it’s always been done. Circuit optimization is an EDA approach that can automatically size all the transistors in a cell, by running SPICE simulations across… Read More
My IC design career started just a few years before PADS got started in 1985 with a DOS-based tool for PCB design. A lot has changed since then, as PADS was acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2001, and continued to grow under Siemens EDA, now with four versions to choose from, where the top version is called PADS Professional Premium:
