I’ve designed hardware and written software for decades now, so it comes as no surprise to see industry trends like Software Defined Radio (SDR) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) growing in importance. Instead of designing a switch with fixed logic you can use an SDN approach to allow for greatest flexibility, even … Read More
Scanning headlines of technology news every day I was somewhat familiar with the phrase “Generative Design” and even browsed the Wikipedia page to find this informative flow-chart that shows the practice of generative design.
Generative design is an iterative design process that involves a program that will generate… Read More
I started designing ICs in 1978 and continued through 1986, and each chip used hierarchy and partitioning but our methodology was totally ad-hoc, and documented on paper, so it was time consuming to make revisions to the chip or train someone else on the history or our chip, let alone re-use any portion of our chips again. Those old,… Read More
The automotive segment is being well served by semiconductor suppliers of all sizes because of the unit volumes, and the constant push to automate more of the driving decisions to silicon and software can raise lots of questions about safety, reliability and trust. Fortunately the ISO standards body has already put in place a functional… Read More
Reliability of ICs isn’t a new thing, because back in 1980 I was investigating why a DRAM chip using 6um technology was having yield loss due to electromigration effects. I recall looking through a microscope at a DRAM layout and slowly ramping up the Vdd level then suddenly the shiny aluminum interconnect started to change… Read More
I use Quicken to manage my business and personal finances because it saves me so much time by downloading all of my transactions from Chase for credit card, Amazon for credit card, Wells Fargo for banking and Schwab for IRA. Likewise, for IP management in SoC design you want an app like Quicken that plays well with other tools that you… Read More
In the semiconductor world we have divided our engineering talent up into many adjacent disciplines and each comes with their own job titles: Design engineers, Verification engineers, DFT engineers, Test engineers. When first silicon becomes available then everyone on the team, and especially management all have a few big … Read More
Reading the many articles on SemiWiki and other publications we find experts talking about the automotive market, mostly because it’s in growth mode, has large volumes and vehicles consume more semiconductors every year. OK, that’s on the plus side, but what about functional safety for automotive electronics?… Read More
Most of us continue to drive cars and for me there’s always been a fascination with all things electrical that go into the actual design of a car. I’ve done typical maintenance tasks on my cars over the years like changing the battery, installing a new radio, replacing bulbs, changing a fuse, swapping out dashboard lights,… Read More
No single EDA company provides all of the tools needed to define requirements, design exploration, track IP, simulate, manage and verify a complex SoC system, so it makes sense that EDA vendors and point tool companies have tools that work together to achieve all of these difficult tasks. Systems design has been around for decades… Read More
