All Things Semiconductor!
Several years ago, I was a consultant to a company called Gauda, Inc. I enjoyed working with Gauda as the technology was interesting. On June 3, 2014, Gauda, Inc. was acquired by D2S, Inc. so their technology lives on. Gauda was focused on optical proximity correction (OPC) and optical proximity verification solutions utilizing… Read More
In EDA the most successful companies will often re-write their software tools in order to add new features, improve accuracy, increase capacity and of course, shorten run times. For SPICE circuit simulators we typically look at several factors to see if a new tool is worth a look or not:
I first started using a SPICE circuit simulator in 1978 while at Intel and have followed that market ever since then. Back at DAC in 2012 I first heard of a Chinese EDA company called IC Scape with a SPICE circuit simulator called Aeolus, so I blogged about it. Fast forward to 2019 and I heard from Ravi Ravikumar, a former co-worker from… Read More
I started out my engineering career by doing transistor-level circuit design and we used a proprietary SPICE circuit simulator. One thing that I quickly realized was that the accuracy of my circuit simulations depended entirely on the model files and parasitics. Here we are 40 years later and the accuracy of SPICE circuit simulations… Read More
It was 1988 when I got into SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis)while I was characterizing a 1.5 μm Standard cell library developed by students at my Alma-Mata Furtwangen University in Germany. My professor Dr. Nielinger was not only my advisor he also wrote the first SPICE bible in German language.… Read More
Intento Design builds responsive analog EDA. The ID-Xplore[SUP]TM[/SUP] tool is used for analog design acceleration and technology porting at the functional level, helping companies move analog IP quickly between technology nodes and across business units. The Intention view[SUP]TM[/SUP] is a simple, elegant, and powerful… Read More
Traditionally, EDA has been a brute force methodology where we buy more software licenses and more CPUs and keep running endless jobs to keep up with the increasing design and process complexities. SPICE simulation for example; when I meet chip designers (which I do quite frequently) I ask them how many simulations they do for a … Read More
Automotive ICs have to operate in a very demanding environment in terms of both temperature and voltage ranges, along with the ability to withstand g-forces and be sealed from the elements. Not an easy design challenge. For many consumer ICs we see output drive currents on the IO pins measured in mA, however in automotive if you want… Read More
I knew that the acronym for TFT meant Thin Film Transistors, but I hadn’t heard that FPD stands for Flat Panel Detectors. It turns out the FPD are solid-state sensors used in x-ray applications, similar in operation to image sensors for digital photography and video. I’ll be attending and blogging about what I learn… Read More
Back at DAC in 2011 I first started to hear about this EDA company named edXact that specialized in reducing and analyzing IC parasitic extraction results. So Silvaco acquired edXact and I wanted to get an update on what is new with their EDA tools that help help you to analyze and manage the massive amount of extracted RLC and even K … Read More
