What Is The Definition Of Design For Context?


EDA industry pundits and bloggers are latching onto a new term: design for context. So far, it has eluded a crisp yet complete definition. It's one of those ideas that if you ask ten people about it, you get ten different answers – some better than others. Ed Sperling wryly observed this in his recent panel discussions about the topic: "Even my questions are getting longer." When Keysight lis... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Cadence unveiled a new environment to automate and accelerate the complete design closure cycle from signoff optimization through routing, static timing analysis (STA), and extraction. The Certus Closure Solution allows concurrent, full-chip optimization through a massively parallel and distributed architecture and engine shared with Cadence’s Innovus Implementation System and the Tempus Timi... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 12


Synopsys' Richard Solomon, Madhumita Sanyal, and Gary Ruggles take a look at the possibilities that CXL 3.0 can bring to a variety of data-driven applications that demand increasingly higher levels of memory capacity, with higher bandwidth, more security, and lower latency. Siemens EDA's Rich Edelman provides some tips for debugging UVM testbenches, such as how to determine what line changed... » read more

Digitizing Memory Design And Verification To Accelerate Development Turnaround Time


By Anand Thiruvengadam, Farzin Rasteh, Preeti Jain, and Jim Schultz Some digital design and verification engineers imagine that their colleagues working on analog/mixed-signal (AMS) chips are jealous. After all, the digital development flow has enjoyed the benefits of increased automation and higher levels of abstraction for many years. Hand-instantiated devices and manual interconnection we... » read more

Debug This! How To Simplify Coverage Analysis And Closure


For years the process of ASIC and FPGA design and verification debug consisted primarily of comprehending the structure and source code of the design with waveforms showing activity over time, based on testbench stimulus. Today, functional verification is exponentially complex with the emergence of new layers of design requirements (beyond basic functionality) that did not exist years ago — f... » read more

Week in Review: Design, Low Power


Could power beams be the key to smart city infrastructure and 5G/6G connectivity? A new report says both lasers and microwaves offer possible paths forward in this area, though both technologies come with benefits and drawbacks. Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are desi... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 5


Arm's Andrew Pickard chats with Georgia Tech's Azad Naeemi and Da Eun Shim about an effort to evaluate the benefit of new interconnect materials and wire geometry and determine their impacts at the microprocessor level. Synopsys' Shekhar Kapoor shares highlights from a recent panel exploring the promises, challenges, and realities of 3D IC technology, including the potential of 3D nanosystem... » read more

Extending The Benefits Of UVM To Include AMS: An Update On Accellera’s UVM-AMS Standard Development


By Tom Fitzpatrick and Peter Grove SoC teams can be divided up into design and verification groups. For digital designs, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), initially developed by Accellera and now standardized as IEEE 1800.2, has been the industry standard for the past decade. Since most SoC designs also have analog and mixed-signal IP blocks, it would be ideal for verification en... » read more

IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

Golden Signoff ECO For Last-Mile Electronic Design Closure


Electronic design developers really hate iterative, resource-intensive tasks that occur late in the project schedule. Most engineers are under tremendous time to market (TTM) pressure due to competition while being told that they must minimize the cost of both the project and the end chip. In addition, they are struggling to meet power, performance, and area (PPA) requirements far more aggressi... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →