Power, Signal, Thermal and EMI signoff

Power, Signal, Thermal and EMI signoff
by Paul McLellan on 08-28-2012 at 1:55 pm

Increasingly the challenge with SoCs, especially for mobile, is not getting the performance high enough but doing so in a power-efficient manner. Handheld devices running multiple apps need high-speed processors that consume extremely low levels of power both in operating and standby modes. In the server farm, the limit is … Read More


3D Thermal Analysis

3D Thermal Analysis
by Paul McLellan on 07-17-2012 at 11:32 am

Matt Elmore of ANSYS/Apache has an interesting blog posting about thermal analysis in 3D integrated circuits. With both technical and economic challenges at process nodes as we push below 28nm, increasingly product groups are looking towards through-silicon-via (TSV) based approaches as a way of keeping Moore’s law… Read More


RedHawk: On to the Future

RedHawk: On to the Future
by Paul McLellan on 05-01-2012 at 6:00 am

For many, maybe most, big designs, Apache’s RedHawk is the signoff tool for analyzing issues around power: electromigration, power supply droop, noise, transients and so on. But the latest designs have some issues: they are enormous (so you can’t just analyze them naively any more than you can run a Spice simulation… Read More