Webinars are a powerful way for engineers to get updated on EDA and IC design approaches, so I’m sharing what I viewed last month at a Silvaco webinar on TFT and FPD design. You probably are using a TFT LCD display in your TV, monitor, mobile phone, video game system, GPS device or projector. The custom IC design flow offered by… Read More
As I write there are multiple displays in front of me that use TFT, LCD or OLED displays:
As an engineer I’ve learned how to trade off using various EDA tools based on the accuracy requirements and the time available to complete a project. EDA vendors have been offering software tools to help us with reliability concerns like EM, IR drop and thermal analysis for several years now. Last week I attended a webinar … Read More
Designing an IC has both a logical and physical aspect to it, so while the logic in your next chip may be bug-free and meet the spec, how do you know if the physical layout will be reliable in terms of EM (electro-migration), IR (voltage drops) and thermal issues? EDA software once again comes to our rescue to perform the specific type… Read More
This weekend my old garage door opener started to fail, so it was time to shop for a new one at The Home Depot, and much to my surprise I found that Chamberlain offered a Smartphone-controlled WiFi system. Just think of that, controlling my garage door with a Smartphone, but then again the question arose, “What happens when a … Read More
Cost is a major barrier when an electronic design company starts to consider developing a custom SoC for a particular market segment. But what if there was a way to lower the development cost, or even get to an SoC proof of concept for no cost except of course for your engineering expenses? That value proposition caught my attention… Read More
Back at DAC in 2011 I first started to hear about this EDA company named edXact that specialized in reducing and analyzing IC parasitic extraction results. So Silvaco acquired edXact and I wanted to get an update on what is new with their EDA tools that help help you to analyze and manage the massive amount of extracted RLC and even K … Read More
Using an FPGA to prototype your next hardware design is a familiar concept, extending all the way back to the time that the first FPGAs were being produced by Xilinx and Altera. There are multiple competitors in the marketplace for FPGA prototyping, so I wanted to discern more about what the German-based company PRO DESIGN had to … Read More
Leading edge SoC designs can contain billions of transistors, cost over $10M to design, and take over 18 months to deliver, but not all SoCs require that much complexity, cost and time. In fact, there is a growing class of SoC designs that integrate the popular ARM Cortex-M0 processor along with analog blocks that work with sensors… Read More
There’s no doubt that programmable logic in FPGAs have transformed our electronics industry for the better. If you do ASIC designs then there’s always the pressure of getting first silicon correct, with no functional or timing bugs, because bugs will cause expensive re-spins and delay time to market. ASIC designers… Read More
