The Week In Review: Design


Mergers & Acquisitions Synopsys made a couple of announcements this week related to its TCAD business. First, they acquired Gold Standard Simulations, which clearly became a major factor in the release of a pre-wafer simulation solution to help semiconductor manufacturers reduce process node development time. The new solution aims to provide a comprehensive process, transistor and circui... » read more

What Will China Do Next?


China's attempts to buy up U.S. chip companies is undergoing more gyrations, this time spurred by the exchange rate set by the People's Bank of China and the U.S. Federal Reserve's expected interest rate hikes. The central bank dropped the exchange rate of the yuan versus the dollar to its lowest rate since 2011, according to Bloomberg. The current rate is now 6.55 yuan per dollar, compared ... » read more

The Mightier Microcontroller


Microcontrollers are becoming more complex, more powerful, and significantly more useful, but those improvements come with strings attached. While it's relatively straightforward to develop multi-core microcontroller (MCU) hardware with advanced power management features, it's much more difficult to write software for these chips because memory is limited. CPUs can use on-chip memory such as... » read more

Do Single-Vendor Flows Make Sense Yet?


For many years in the EDA industry, there has been talk of a complete design tool flow from a single vendor, and each of the main EDA players is capable of offering one. But whether they actually do — or should — is an interesting discussion. There are obvious pros and cons on the technical side. But it is the business and marketing issues that are really at the crux of the debate today.... » read more

Ray Zinn Reflects On 37 Years As CEO Of Micrel


Believed to be the longest serving CEO of any company to have existed in Silicon Valley, Ray Zinn does more in retirement than many people would accomplish as full time employees. While his name may not be at the top of most influential people in the valley, the industry may not be the same today had it not been for his contributions. Semiconductor Engineering spoke with him about his past, the... » read more

Prototyping Server Farms


Coming from the virtual prototyping world, I envisioned FPGA-based prototyping as mostly a one on one application, meaning that the system resides with the end user or at least in a room close to the end user. However, it turns out that a lot of companies have moved towards a physical prototyping server farm setup. Let’s look at what it means to have a prototyping server farm, the associat... » read more

What I Learned About Heatsinks Using Thermal Simulation


By Yousaf Mohammed, Student Intern at Mentor Graphics When designing electronics, heat dissipated to the surroundings by micro devices is an important consideration because heat has a powerful and stringent effect on their operation and lifespan.  When an electronic device overheats, components start to wear out more quickly, degrade, cross the threshold into safe mode, and then stop functi... » 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

The Top Five Trends in Verification to Watch for at DAC 2016


The Design Automation Conference in Austin is upon us, so it's time for my annual preview of what to look for. In my mind, five trends stand out and are clearly visible in the DAC program as well as in what we are presenting at our booth: Stronger ties between verification engines Software-driven verification with portable stimulus Metric-driven verification Application specificity ... » read more

Formal Confusion


Formal verification has come a long way in the past five years. Tool developers changed direction and started to create self-contained apps which have led to a rapid proliferation of the technology. But formal is a diverse set of tools that can solve a variety of problems in the verification space and this has created a different kind of confusion within the industry. To find out how the indust... » read more

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