Imagine how semiconductor design sizes leapt higher with automation in digital design, which started from standard hardware languages like Verilog and VHDL; analog design automation is still catching up. However, it was not without a significant effort put in moving designers from entering schematics to writing RTL, which… Read More
Yesterday Mentor announced their quarterly results. Since their financial year is not aligned with the calendar year, this was also the end of their fiscal 2015. The quarter was an all-time record with revenues of $439M and (non-GAAP) EPS of $1.09. The year was also an all-time record with revenues of $1.24B and EPS of $1.77. Half… Read More
In a world with mobile and IoT devices driven by ultra-low power, high performance and small footprint transistors, FinFET based designs are ideal. FinFETs provide high current drive, low leakage and high device density. However, a FinFET transistor is more exposed to thermal issues, electro migration (EM), and electrostatic… Read More
I think by now there has been good level of discussion on FinFET technology at sub-20 nm process nodes and this is an answer to ultra dense, high performance, low power, and billion+ gate SoC designs within the same area. However, it comes with some of the key challenges with respect to power, noise and reliability of the design. A FinFET… Read More
In this age of electronics, especially with so many different types of human held devices and more upcoming wearable devices, it’s utmost important to protect the massive circuitry inside those tiny parts in the devices from ESD related failures. The protection needs to happen at all stages – cells inside the chips, package… Read More
Last week my daughter was playing some games on my Google Nexus smartphone for a while when one of my friends called. When I picked up the phone, I couldn’t imagine it was so hot. There is no doubt; every electronic device today emits an order of magnitude higher heat than what it used to at most a decade ago. There is so much emphasis on … Read More
According to Steven Hawking, Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun orbits around our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported… Read More
This week, I had a nice opportunity meeting Charu Puri, Corporate Marketing and Sushil Gupta, V.P. & Managing Director at Atrenta, Noida. Well, I know Sushil since 1990s; in fact, he was my manager at one point of time during my job earlier than Cadence. He leads this large R&D development centre, consisting about 200 people… Read More
Tom Feist of Xilinx presented here at the GlobalPress Electronics Summit about their strategy to take design abstraction up another level. In the SoC world, we are still pretty much stuck at the RTL level and have moved to higher abstractions by using an IP strategy. But at least all IC designers are RTL-literate.
Xilinx, in the Vivado… Read More
In July Cadence acquired Sigrity, one of the leaders in PCB and IC packaging analysis. Until a decade ago, signal integrity and power analysis was something that only IC designers needed to worry about. For all except the highest performance boards, relatively simple tools were sufficient. Provided you hooked up the pins on all… Read More
