IP Reuse and Management in Monterey!

IP Reuse and Management in Monterey!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-08-2014 at 10:30 pm

One of the benefits of being part of SemiWiki is building relationships with a wide variety of companies covering every semiconductor design application imaginable. We are blessed, absolutely. Another benefit of being part of SemiWiki are the invitations to attend, participate, and even organize events such as EDPS. Last year… Read More


Sebastian Thrun: Self-driving cars, MOOCs, Google Glass and more

Sebastian Thrun: Self-driving cars, MOOCs, Google Glass and more
by Paul McLellan on 03-31-2014 at 4:00 pm

Sebastian Thrun gave a fascinating keynote at SNUG last week. It didn’t have that much to do with IC design but he discussed 3 projects that he had been involved with. Anyone would be happy to have just one of these projects on their resume but he has all these (and more).

The first is the Google self-driving car. This project actually… Read More


Book review: “shift left” with virtual prototypes

Book review: “shift left” with virtual prototypes
by Don Dingee on 03-26-2014 at 1:00 pm

Shipping a product with complete software support at official release is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Inevitably, there is less than enough hardware to go around, and what little there is has to fill the needs of hardware designers, test and certification engineers, software development teams, systems integration teams,… Read More


SNUG and IC Compiler II

SNUG and IC Compiler II
by Paul McLellan on 03-25-2014 at 4:04 pm

I have been at SNUG for the last couple of days. The big announcement is IC Compiler II. It was a big part of Aart’s keynote and Monday lunch featured all the lead customers talking about their experience with the tool.

The big motivation for IC Compiler II was to create a fully multi-threaded physical design tool that will scale… Read More


AMS Verification and Regression Testing of SoC Designs

AMS Verification and Regression Testing of SoC Designs
by Daniel Payne on 03-25-2014 at 10:02 am

Digital verification engineers on SoC designs have adopted many techniques to help ensure first silicon success: using compiled simulators, constrained random test, simulation farms, SystemVerilog methodology, and self-checking testbenches. AMS verification has tended to be ad-hoc or sharply divided into separate analog… Read More


IC Implementation Tool Gets a Rewrite, Now 10X Faster

IC Implementation Tool Gets a Rewrite, Now 10X Faster
by Daniel Payne on 03-24-2014 at 10:05 am

EDA start-up companies often have the advantage over established vendors by being able to start from scratch, instead of having to maintain some legacy code that no longer is competitive. But what happens when the established vendor decides to rewrite their IC implementation tools from scratch? In this case it’s good news,… Read More


SEMI Breakfast Forums: the Internet of Things

SEMI Breakfast Forums: the Internet of Things
by Paul McLellan on 03-21-2014 at 4:29 pm

Coming up on April 10th is the SEMI Silicon Valley Breakfast Forum Internet of Things—Driving the Microelectronics Revolution. It runs from 7am to 10.45am and will be held at SEMI Headquarters which is at 3081 Zanker Road in San Jose.

Widespread adoption of the Internet of Things will take time, but the movement is advancing thanks… Read More


Dr. Walden Rhines Vision on Semiconductor & India

Dr. Walden Rhines Vision on Semiconductor & India
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-04-2014 at 11:00 am

Last month India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA) held its Vision Summit at Bangalore in which luminaries from across the semiconductor and electronics industry presented their views about the future of this industry and India’s progress. Dr. Walden C. Rhines, Chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphicspresented… Read More


Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler

Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler
by Paul McLellan on 03-04-2014 at 8:00 am

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


Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3

Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3
by Paul McLellan on 02-28-2014 at 12:17 pm

Since Synopsys acquired Eve over a year ago, they haven’t announced anything new in the ZeBu product line. Emulators are not like software where you expect incremental releases a couple of times per year, each new “release” is a complete re-design using new hardware fabric in a new process technology. Earlier… Read More