Steering The Semiconductor Industry


Progress in semiconductors has been one of the most successful engineering feats, and the industry has ridden an exponential curve longer than anything else in history. It is also a highly conservative industry that has pushed away many disruptive changes in favor of small incremental changes that minimize risk. There have been significant changes over the decades, and they often required a ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys revealed a power analysis solution for early SoC design as well as signoff-accurate power and reliability closure. PrimePower has reliability as a major focus, expanding power and reliability signoff and ECO closure capabilities from physical awareness to cell electromigration effects. Supported power types include peak power, average power, clock network power, leakage power, a... » read more

Get Ready For Verification 3.0


Jim Hogan, managing partner of Vista Ventures, LLC, is perhaps the best-known investor in the EDA space. Recently, he has been focusing time and attention on verification startups, including cloud technology company Metrics, and Portable Stimulus pioneer Breker Verification Systems. This adds to his longer-term commitment to formal verification with OneSpin Solutions. These companies are part ... » read more

Is The IP Industry Healthy?


The semiconductor industry has been through many changes, each designed to reduce the total cost associated with the design and manufacture of chips. Twenty years ago, most companies had their own fabs and designed all of the circuitry on each chip. Today, only a handful of companies still own a fab and outsourcing design, in the form of intellectual property ([getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"]), has... » read more

Monday At DAC


The 54th DAC got started today in a very steamy Austin. While we may be a maturing industry, there is certainly no indications that the people within the industry have given up or intend to take it easy. The event really got started late Sunday when Laurie Balch, chief analyst for Gary Smith EDA, delivered her message. She said that the focus is becoming the verticals. "This change in focus is ... » read more

DAC Day One: EDA Through Different Glasses


DAC is back in Austin after being away for three years. The weather improved for our arrival after the bad thunderstorms of the past couple of weeks. The sun came out and started to heat everything up. With water still pooling around the place, it was somewhat humorous to see a bus pass with the slogan "Think about Austin without water." DAC starts, as it always has in my memory, with a pres... » read more

Poised For Aspect-Oriented Design?


In 1992, [getperson id=" 11046 " comment="Yoav Hollander"] had the idea to take a software programming discipline called aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and apply it to the verification of hardware. Those concepts were incorporated into the [gettech id="31021" t_name="e"] language and [getentity id="22068" e_name="Verisity"] was formed to commercialize it. Hollander had seen that using obj... » read more

New Directions For EDA


DAC is over and everyone is asking – what was the theme this year? It is sometimes difficult to make such a determination because quite often the theme has been there for some time, but suddenly appears more obvious than it did in the past. Some years it is a new product or class of products. The theme also can remain hidden, or disguised. As an example, people have been talking about the ... » read more

DAC 2015: Day One


It requires a certain dedication to attend technical DAC sessions on a Sunday morning, but full day workshops start before 9:00am for those dedicated to hearing about the latest work being conducted in academia and the research arm of industry. These are highly technical sessions that target academics and those serious about keeping a pulse on up and coming technologies. One such workshop wa... » read more

The Real Numbers: Redefining NRE


Developing ICs at the most advanced nodes is getting more expensive, but exactly how much more expensive is the subject of debate across the semiconductor industry. There are a number of reasons for this discrepancy. Among them: As design flows shift from serial to parallel, it's hard to determine which groups within companies should be saddled with different portions of the bill. The re... » read more

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