Why Every Design IP Needs A Complete QA Methodology

By WeiLii Tan - 22 Sep, 2022 - Comments: 0

Design IP is a key contributor to innovation in the semiconductor industry today. As the complexity and scale of silicon designs increase, so does design and verification time. Design IP enables modularization and re-use of design components, so that designers can leverage already-existing components as a baseline to accelerate design schedules. Therefore, it is not surprising that the usage of... » read more

Using ML Methods In Production-Ready Engineering Solutions For IC Verification

By WeiLii Tan - 02 Aug, 2022 - Comments: 0

By WeiLii Tan & Jeff Dyck Semiconductor designs continue to push the envelope of performance, functionality, and efficiency while their application scope expands in high-performance computing, automotive solutions, and IoT devices. The increased design complexity, scale, and mission-critical operations of semiconductor designs mean that IC verification strategies must evolve to cover expon... » read more

Timing Library LVF Validation For Production Design Flows

By WeiLii Tan - 27 Feb, 2020 - Comments: 3

Variation modeling has evolved over the past several years from a single derating factor that represents on-chip variation (OCV), to Liberty Variation Format (LVF), today’s leading standard format that encapsulates variation information in timing libraries (.libs). LVF data is considered a requirement for advanced process nodes 22nm and below. At the smallest process nodes such as 7nm and ... » read more

Cloud Characterization

By WeiLii Tan - 19 Dec, 2019 - Comments: 0

Library characterization is a compute-intensive task that takes days to weeks to complete. Runtimes for library characterization are increasing due to larger library sizes, higher number of operating conditions to characterize, as well as the need for statistical variation modeling in libraries at 22/20nm and smaller process nodes. Cloud platforms offer a way to accelerate library characterizat... » read more

Next-Generation Liberty Verification And Debugging

By WeiLii Tan - 27 Sep, 2018 - Comments: 1

Accurate library characterization is a crucial step for modern chip design and verification. For full-chip designs with billions of transistors, timing sign-off through simulation is unfeasible due to run-time and memory constraints. Instead, a scalable methodology using static timing analysis (STA) is required. This methodology uses the Liberty file to encapsulate library characteristics such ... » read more