In SoC design it’s all about managing complexity through modeling, and the models that make up IC designs come in a wide range of file formats like:
Even with standard file formats, designers still have to traverse the hierarchy to find out… Read More
I recently had a call with Rob Dekker, Founder and CTO of Verific. If you’re in EDA or semiconductor CAD, chances are high that you know who they are. They’re king of the hill in parser software for SystemVerilog and VHDL. When you hear a line like that, you assume a heavy dose of marketing spin, but here it really is fact. I don’t know of… Read More
Several common aspects have existed for what is now the modern Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. When I joined TI in 1972, the company was very proud of its design automation capability as a competitive differentiator. Much of the… Read More
IP must be properly qualified before attempting to use them in any IC design flow. One cannot wait to catch issues further down the chip design cycle. Waiting for issues to appear during design verification poses extremely high risks, including schedule slippage. For example, connection errors in transistor bulk terminals where… Read More
AMIQ EDA has caught my attention over the last few months. My first impression was that this was just another small IDE company trying to compete with established and bundled IDEs from the big 3, a seemingly insurmountable barrier. This view was challenged by an impressive list of testimonials, not just from the little guys but also… Read More
Semiconductor IP re-use is a huge part of the productivity gains in SoC designs, so instead of starting from a clean slate most chip engineers are re-using cells, blocks, modules and even sub-systems from previous designs in order to meet their schedule and stay competitive in the market place. But what happens when you intend to… Read More
HDL languages are a matter of engineering personal preference and often corporate policy dictates which language you should be using on your next SoC design. In the early days we used our favorite text-based editor like Vi or Emacs, my choice was Vi. The problem with these text-based editors of course is that they really don’t… Read More
Back in the early 1980’s during the nascent years of electronic design automation (EDA), I worked at Texas Instruments supporting what would become their merchant ASIC business. Back then, life was a bit different. The challenge we faced was to make our ASIC library available on as many EDA flows as we could to give as many users as… Read More
OK – I admit I titled this piece as clickbait. There is a core of designers for whom belief in the supremacy of EMACS for RTL creation comes close to religion. Some will read only the title and jump immediately to penning searing comments questioning my intelligence, experience, parenthood and ability to tie my own shoes. Some, I hope,… Read More
Modern SoC designs can use billions of transistors where transistors are grouped into gates, then gates grouped into cells, then cells grouped into blocks, blocks grouped into modules, and so on, creating a complex hierarchy. What a front-end designer conceives of logically for a hierarchy will differ from how an optimized physical… Read More
