category: Design Bytes

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Establishing Connectivity Between Die and BGA
By Tyler Lockman - 03 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

The BGA component serves the primary role of redistributing the signals from the die it protects to an interface pattern (the BGA’s balls) compatible with the host PCB it mounts on. As a result, many IC package designs are among those who do not use a front-end schematic. Even if you have a schematic, you may find yourself making logic swaps in the layout where the additional context of the r... » 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

AI Drives A New Wave For Semiconductors
By Paul McLellan - 04 Jun, 2020 - Comments: 0

In Cadence's recent earnings call, Lip-Bu Tan, our CEO, talked about the five waves that are hitting us simultaneously. Here's what he said: First of all, I'm excited about this industry, because it's very unusual to have five major waves happening at the same time. You have the AI machine learning wave and you have 5G is starting to deploy and then you have the hyperscale guy, the really mas... » read more

A New EDA Paradigm Emerges In Computational Software
By Paul McLellan - 07 May, 2020 - Comments: 0

Cadence has a new white paper out on Computational Software. I've written on these topics before, most recently in the posts: Computational Software System Analysis: Computational Software at Scale To set the scene, here is the abstract from the white paper: Electronics technology is evolving rapidly, becoming pervasive in our lives. There are more smartphones in use than there a... » read more

Don’t Get Stranded On Islands, Delete Them
By Tyler Lockman - 02 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

No, this isn’t a Hollywood movie. We’re talking about pieces of plane shapes with no connections to them, not an idyllic private oasis in the Caribbean (sorry). Removing shape islands is something you’ve always been able to do in the Allegro layout environments, but the flow for achieving this has improved significantly in recent years. Come with us, and we’ll compare what the flow u... » read more

Penetration Tests, Prison Security, And Mothers
By Paul McLellan - 05 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

There is always an interesting sounding presentation at RSA that looks like it might be a good blog post topic just based on the title. This year it was "I Had My Mom Break Into A Prison Then We Had Pie" by John Strand of Black Hills Information Security. A pen test is short for a penetration test. They can take various forms from trying to log in to a system they shouldn't, to trying to g... » read more

Signal Integrity Through The Years
By Paul McLellan - 06 Feb, 2020 - Comments: 0

Yesterday, I started to talk about how new technologies find their way over time into EDA tools in my post How Technologies Get into EDA. Let's look at signal integrity as an example. We used not to worry about signal integrity at all. The first time anything like that impinged on my consciousness was in the early 1980s when we realized that we needed to start to consider the inductance... » read more

Open Source Faces Challenges In 2020
By Paul McLellan - 09 Jan, 2020 - Comments: 0

I recently wrote a couple of posts about open-source EDA tools, OpenROAD: Open-Source EDA from RTL to GDSII and 2nd WOSET Workshop on Open-Source EDA. I have also written about open-source in general, as an approach to development and an approach to business in a post from over four years ago that I think stands up well: The Paradox of Open Source. The reason I called it a paradox is that ... » read more

Getting To Orbit And The Rocket Equation
By Paul McLellan - 05 Dec, 2019 - Comments: 0

The Apollo 12 mission recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Launching on November 14, 1969 and returning on November 24, it put humans on the Moon for the second time. I wrote about Apollo 11 (mostly about its guidance computer) earlier in the year in my post The First Computer on the Moon. Today's post is about the rocket equation, and how challenging it is to get into orbit around th... » read more

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