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


Synopsy Eats Their Own Dogfood

Synopsy Eats Their Own Dogfood
by Paul McLellan on 06-29-2015 at 7:00 am

One of the most interesting presentations that I went to was the last presentation at the Synopsys Custom Lunch (no, the lunch wasn’t custom, we all got the same, but the presentations were about custom design). Since the last presentation was by Synopsys themselves and not by a customer, it wouldn’t seem promising that it could … Read More


Synopsys Vision on Custom Automation with FinFET

Synopsys Vision on Custom Automation with FinFET
by Pawan Fangaria on 06-26-2015 at 7:00 am

In an overwhelmingly digital world, there is a constant cry about the analog design process being slow, not automated, going at its own pace in the same old fashion, and so on. And, the analog world is not happy with the way it’s getting dragged into imperfect automation so it can be more like the digital world. True, the analog world… Read More


Bijan Kiani Talks Synopsys Custom Layout and More

Bijan Kiani Talks Synopsys Custom Layout and More
by Paul McLellan on 06-24-2015 at 7:00 am

Last week I sat down and talked to Bijan Kiani of Synopsys. He has marketing responsibility for design implementation products at Synopsys spanning digital, custom and analog mixed signal (AMS).

He was born in Iran and after high school he moved to the UK. He got his PhD degree from University of Edinburgh. It turns out that I was doing… Read More


An Universe of Formats for IP Validation

An Universe of Formats for IP Validation
by Pawan Fangaria on 06-19-2015 at 4:30 pm

Although I knew about Crossfire’s capabilities for signing off quality of an IP before its integration into an SoC, there was much more to learn about this tool when I visited Fractal Technologies booth during this DAC. The complexity handled by this tool to qualify any type of IP for its integration into an SoC can be imagined by the… Read More


DDR stands for Don’t Do (Just) RTL

DDR stands for Don’t Do (Just) RTL
by Don Dingee on 06-16-2015 at 9:00 pm

In optimizing SoC design for performance, there is so much focus on how fast a CPU core is, or a GPU core, or peripherals, or even the efficiency of the chip-level interconnect. Most designers also understand selecting high performance memory at a cost sweet spot, and optimizing physical layout to clock it as fast as possible within… Read More


I Don’t Know Much About Aart…

I Don’t Know Much About Aart…
by Paul McLellan on 06-15-2015 at 7:00 am

Actually, like anyone who has been in EDA for more than a decade or two (or three) I know quite a bit about Aart. But I still learned quite a bit about his views at the Fireside Chat at DAC where Ed Sperling talked to Aart for three-quarters of an hour.

Aart has a great talent at taking various small trends in the industry and aggregating … Read More


Eyes Meet Innovations at DAC

Eyes Meet Innovations at DAC
by Pawan Fangaria on 06-14-2015 at 7:00 am

It gives me a very nice, somewhat nostalgic, feeling after attending the 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] DAC. There was a period during my final academic year in 1990 and my first job when I used to search through good technical papers in DAC proceedings and try implementing those concepts in my project work. In general, representation from ‘R&D… Read More