More FPGA-based prototype myths quashed

More FPGA-based prototype myths quashed
by Don Dingee on 08-03-2015 at 12:00 pm

Speaking of having the right tools, FPGA-based prototyping has become as much if not more about the synthesis software than it is about the FPGA hardware. This is a follow-up to my post earlier this month on FPGA-based prototyping, but with a different perspective from another vendor. Instead of thinking about what else can be done… Read More


John Koeter: How To Be #1 in Interface IP

John Koeter: How To Be #1 in Interface IP
by Paul McLellan on 08-03-2015 at 7:00 am

John Koeter is in charge of marketing Synopsys’ IP and prototyping solutions. I talked to him last week.

He grew up in upstate New York, son of a Scottish mother and a Dutch father who immigrated to the US, so he is first generation American, unlike everyone else I’ve interviewed so far for this series who were born overseas.… Read More


Build Low Power IoT Design with Foundation IP at 40nm

Build Low Power IoT Design with Foundation IP at 40nm
by Pawan Fangaria on 07-28-2015 at 12:00 pm

In a power hungry world of semiconductor devices, multiple ways are being devised to budget power from system to transistor level. The success of IoT (Internet of Things) Edge devices specifically depend on lowest power, lowest area, optimal performance, and lowest cost. These devices need to be highly energy efficient for sustained… Read More


Synopsys’ Andreas Kuehlmann on Software Development

Synopsys’ Andreas Kuehlmann on Software Development
by Paul McLellan on 07-27-2015 at 7:00 am

Andreas Kuehlmann is the general manager of what is officially now known as the Software Integrity Group of Synopsys, what you might think of as Coverity although they have made some acquisitions too, so they now have a broader technology base. I sat down to talk to him last week.

He was brought up in Germany and came to the US in 1991 … Read More


Synopsys Buys Bluetooth IP

Synopsys Buys Bluetooth IP
by Paul McLellan on 07-22-2015 at 7:00 am

There is obviously a broad spectrum of semiconductor IP but broadly speaking it seems to fall into three buckets:

  • foundation IP: standard cells, memories
  • microprocessors and associated peripherals
  • interface IP

Foundation IP is where it all started. When I was at Compass Design Automation in the 1990s that was pretty much what… Read More


Antun Domic, on Synopsys’ Secret Sauce in Design

Antun Domic, on Synopsys’ Secret Sauce in Design
by Paul McLellan on 07-20-2015 at 7:00 am

Antun Domic is the GM of the Design Group at Synopsys. I sat down with him a couple of weeks ago.

His name is Croatian although, of course, there was no Croatia back then it was part of Yugoslavia. But in fact he grew up in Chile and went to university there where he studied EE and math. He came to the US as a grad student and did a PhD at MIT in … Read More


How ARM Implemented a Mali GPU using Logic Synthesis and Place/Route Tools

How ARM Implemented a Mali GPU using Logic Synthesis and Place/Route Tools
by Daniel Payne on 07-17-2015 at 12:00 pm

ARM is a well-known semiconductor IP provider and they often create a reference design so that SoC companies can have a starting point to work with. On the GPU side of IP the ARM engineers have an architecture called Mali, and a recent webinar hosted by Synopsys reviewed how the physical design area was minimized by using a combination… Read More


Circuit Simulation Update from #52DAC

Circuit Simulation Update from #52DAC
by Daniel Payne on 07-08-2015 at 12:00 pm

Actual users of circuit simulators told their design and simulation stories at DAC during a luncheon sponsored by Synopsys on June 8th. I always prefer to hear from a design engineer versus a marketing person about what tool they use for circuit simulation, and how it helps them analyze their design goals. This year there were engineers… Read More


Synopsys Aquires Security IP Company Elliptic

Synopsys Aquires Security IP Company Elliptic
by Paul McLellan on 07-01-2015 at 7:00 am

On Monday Synopsys announced that it was acquiring Elliptic Technologies. They have one of the largest portfolios of security IP consisting of both semiconductor IP blocks and software. Increasingly, security requires a multi-layer approach involving both secure blocks on the chip and a software stack on top of that.

Elliptic’s… Read More


More about “MIPI beyond Mobile” Paper at DAC

More about “MIPI beyond Mobile” Paper at DAC
by Eric Esteve on 06-29-2015 at 12:00 pm

The “MIPI Beyond Mobile” paper has been presented during the 52th DAC in San Francisco and I can share the key findings with Semiwiki readers. This paper has been written to synthesize certain results of the “MIPI Ecosystem Survey-2015” and evaluate the impact on the MIPI IP sales in the future. At first the MIPI Ecosystem has really… Read More