All Things Semiconductor!
It seems that it has always been that there were packages and ICs, and in the design tool world “never the twain shall meet”. The tools for designing packages were completely separate from the tools used to design IC’s. This was so profoundly true that even after Cadence merged with Valid Logic back in the early 90’s, their Allegro … Read More
As a preferred carrier to data or energy, photonics technology is becoming broad and diverse. In IC design, silicon-photonics technology has been the enabler of new capabilities and has revolutionized many applications as Moore’s-based scaling started to experience a slowdown. It acts as new on-chip inductor in HPC design … Read More
Cadence has done a good job of keeping up with the needs of analog RF designs. Of course, the term RF used to be reserved for a thin slice of designs that were used specifically in RF applications. Now, it covers things like SerDes for networking chips that have to operate in the gigahertz range. Add that to the trend of combining RF and… Read More
The year is now 1991 and in search for a more peaceful life we decided to move to Canada. At that time, very few companies had advanced flows in VLSI but Ottawa having BNR, Northern Telecom, Mitel, etc., looked to be the most promising place. After a few hiccups in finding a job, I landed in MOSAID, a small company with35 people at that … Read More
In November of 2016, I made a bold statement that October 20, 2016 would stand as a watershed day in integrated photonics. The reason for this claim was that GLOBALFOUNDRIES proclaimed that integrated photonics was real and here to stay. The same week I wrote an article about Cadence Design Systems securing a photonic beachhead … Read More
A couple weeks ago I gave a heads-up about a webinar that was being hosted by ClioSoft, Qorvo and Keysight. The topic of the webinar was how to manage custom RF designs across multiple design teams and CAD flows. The webinar was held on February 1[SUP]st[/SUP] and included presentations by Marcus Ray of Qorvo and Michele Azarian of… Read More
This week Cadence Design, Lumerical Solutions and PhoeniX Software hosted a two-day photonic summit and workshop. The first day had nearly 100 registered participants and featured industry leaders from Global Foundries, UCSB, MIT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, General Electric, Boeing, Rockley Photonics, and Juniper Networks… Read More
Mixed-signal design creates all sorts of interesting problems for implementation and verification flows, particularly when it comes to design for low power. We tend to think of mixed-signal as a few blocks like PLLs, ADCs and PHYs on the periphery of the design. Constrain and verify the digital power requirements up to analog … Read More
One of the surprises at DAC for ICScape was to be listed on Gary Smith’s list of companies to see. Surprised, since ICScape had never presented their products to him. They were listed under design debug. They don’t have a single product that really falls under that description, but rather a family of tools under the ICExplorer… Read More
Reusing design IP is crucial for competitiveness. The need for reuse occurs with new designs on the same process node as the original design, new designs at the same node but using a different PDK or foundry, or designs on a different process node – usually smaller. However, achieving effective IP reuse has always been a challenge.… Read More
