Paul McLellan

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Paul McLellan is a blogger at Cadence.

Author's Latest Posts

Attaching Fibers To Photonic Chips
By Paul McLellan - 10 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Recently, Cadence held its fifth photonics summit, CadenceCONNECT: Photonics Contribution to High-Performance Computing. You can read my earlier posts: Photonic Integration—From Switching to Computing How to Design Photonics If You Don't Have a PhD: iPronics and Ayar Labs The third day was all about how to connect the incoming and outgoing fibers to the photonics chips. I will cov... » read more

Capabilities In CAP, CHERI, And Morello
By Paul McLellan - 03 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

At the recent Arm DevSummit, one of the presentations mentioned CHERI and the Arm Morello board in passing. This was in the context of using capabilities (perhaps) in some future Arm processors to increase the amount of memory safety, and to protect against vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown. I'd never heard of either, so I was intrigued and decided to look into the details. But the f... » read more

Arm Goes For Performance
By Paul McLellan - 12 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

At the recent Linley Processor Conference, Arm presented two processors. This was regarded as so confidential that the original pre-conference version of the presentations didn't contain the Arm one, even though that pdf was only put online about an hour before. But most of the outline of what they presented they already talked about in May, a few months ago. I said recently that this seem... » read more

Electronics In Agriculture
By Paul McLellan - 05 Nov, 2020 - Comments: 0

In my post Jobs: Farmer I wrote about my experience as a teenager working on the farm owned (actually rented from the Duke of Badminton) by the father of one of my school friends. Electronics were nowhere to be found in those days. I recently watched some YouTube videos that show just how hi-tech farming has become now that Moore's Law has made accessible electronics that would have seemed ma... » read more

Testing For Electromagnetic Compliance Without An Anechoic Chamber
By Paul McLellan - 15 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

You can't sell an electronic product without getting CE or FCC (or equivalent) certification. In fact, for medical devices and aerospace, the requirements are even stricter. This doesn't just apply to obvious electronic products like laptops or automotive ECUs (electronic control units). It even applies to household goods like washers and dryers. Furthermore, this isn't just some sort of nice-t... » read more

One SerDes Solution Doesn’t Fit All
By Paul McLellan - 08 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Way back in the 1960s, E. Rent, who was working at IBM at the time, noticed a connection between the number of pins P on integrated circuits being used and the number of gates G on the integrated circuits. It was a power law, where the number of pins was cGR where c and R are constants. Actually, traditionally a Greek rho is used instead of R. It usually has a value between 0.5 and 0.8. If R... » read more

OIP Ecosystem Forum 2020
By Paul McLellan - 10 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Last Tuesday was the virtual TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum. Apart from being virtual, the format was similar to the usual. Cliff Hou, Senior Vice President of Technology Development, opened the day with a summary of where everything is in the ecosystem around each of the new processes. There were then three keynotes by the leaders of the three big EDA companies. That was followed by more technical ... » read more

Accellera Tackles Functional Safety
By Paul McLellan - 06 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

During DAC, Accellera had a workshop about functional safety. In case you don't know, Accellera has a relatively new working group (WG) on Functional Safety. The chair is Cadence's Alessandra Nardi, who coincidentally also received the Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA during DAC (you can read more about that in my post Alessandra Nardi Receives Marie Pistilli Award for Women in EDA). But ... » read more

New Design For Trusted Data
By Paul McLellan - 01 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Recently, I wrote about Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE from now on) which I think is going to be something big that you will hear lots about in the future. Here's the reason I think it is going to be big. The people who care the most about security, such as financial institutions, governments, and companies with huge amounts of valuable data (such as semiconductor companies, or social m... » read more

Models Built With Water
By Paul McLellan - 11 Jun, 2020 - Comments: 0

A couple of years ago I wrote a post using the famous quote by statistician George Box: All Models Are Wrong; Some Are Useful. In that post, I discussed paper and plastic airplanes, but mostly I talked about modeling in computers, and especially what I call the "digital illusion." The digital illusion is the idea that signals in digital chips are ones and zeros, with timing, and not analog vol... » read more

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