Design Tool Think Tank Required


When I was in the EDA industry as a technologist, there were three main parts to my role. The first was to tell customers about new technologies being developed and tool extensions that would be appearing in the next release. These were features they might find beneficial both in the projects they were undertaking today, and even more so, would apply to future projects. Second, I would try and ... » read more

The End Of Closed EDA


In a previous life, I was a technologist for a large EDA company. One of my primary responsibilities in that position involved talking to a lot of customers to identify their pain points, and what new tools we could develop that would ease their problems. You would think that would be an easy task, but it certainly was not the case. For example, if you ask a developer what their biggest frus... » read more

Hyper-Convergence Is The New Normal For Digital Implementation


The era of smart-everything has led to a surge in the need for semiconductor devices across a myriad of traditional and novel applications. These applications demand high performance yet energy-efficient compute over blazing-fast networks to service trillions of edge devices that are constantly consuming and generating large amounts of data. This surge has invigorated system architects to innov... » read more

3 Ways To Improve Design Collaboration: Part 3


The first two blog posts in this three-part series focused on the design team’s capability to communicate efficiently. An accurate to-do list is the basis of providing accurate estimates for project release schedules. The Cliosoft VDD (Visual Design Diff) tool is an effective way to maintain a live and accurate “to-do list” for design engineers and managers alike. Additionally, it provide... » read more

The Single Best DFT Move You Can Make


A proven method to simplify a complex problem is to break it into smaller chunks. In the case of today’s large, complex SoCs, this means using hierarchical methods to design the blocks, then combine the results at the top level. While this sounds obvious, it hasn’t always been practical or technologically feasible to perform some tasks, like DFT, at the block level and translate that work s... » read more

Synthesizing Computer Vision Designs To Hardware


Computer vision is one of the hottest markets in electronic design today. Digital processing of images and video with complex algorithms in order to interpret meaning has almost as many applications and markets as there are uses for the human eye. The biggest problem that designers face is that the computer vision system requirements and algorithms change quickly and often. Even the targ... » read more

Design Flows At 5nm And Beyond


It’s probably the first time that you’ll ever hear an old (well, old-ish!) person say this, but things were easier back in my day. 40 nanometers was the most advanced node that I ever designed SoCs at and, although it wasn’t easy back then, it pales against the myriad of challenges facing designers today. Back then, compartmentalization of function and roles was relatively easy. We do ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys acquired Silicon and Beyond, a provider of high-speed SerDes and ADC/DAC IP. The company was founded in 2012 as SilabTech and headquartered in Bangalore. Synopsys highlighted the team of R&D engineers with high-speed SerDes expertise that would be joining with the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. ANSYS will acquire OPTIS, a provider of software for sci... » read more

Plugging Gaps In Advanced Packaging


The growing difficulty of cramming more features into an SoC is driving the entire chip industry to consider new packaging options, whether that is a more complex, integrated SoC or some type of advanced packaging that includes multiple chips. Most of the work done in this area so far has been highly customized. But as advanced packaging heads into the mainstream, gaps are beginning to appea... » read more

Going Open Source


Open Source often is thought of as an alternative to commercial software licensed using fairly typical business models. For example, variants of open source Linux supplied by companies such as Red Hat charge a subscription for support and maintenance. Maybe there is an opportunity to leverage Open Source alongside commercial EDA software to provide use model advantages and open development f... » read more