Automated Late Stage Timing-Aware Dynamic Voltage Drop ECO


One of the never-ending frustrations for electrical engineers is having to deal with counterproductive real-world effects that they wish would just go away. Examples include switch bounce, metastability, and contact resistance. For IC designers, dynamic voltage drop (DVD), also known as IR drop, is one of those unfortunate facts of the profession. There’s no way to avoid it; every trace and w... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Top Of The News Google announced it will support the RISC-V architecture with the Android open-source operating system. In a keynote at the RISC-V Summit, Lars Bergstrom, Google's director of engineering for the Android Platform Programming Languages, noted that Android currently has more than 3 billion users and the support of more than 24,000 vendors. "We've been following RISC-V for a very ... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 4


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster investigates the percentage of total IC/ASIC project time spent in verification and increasing engineering headcount, particularly growing demand for verification engineers. Synopsys' Stelios Diamantidis argues that retargeting older chips using AI offers a way to move chip designs between nodes and absorb the market’s excess capacity. Cadence's Paul McLellan ... » read more

Adapting To Broad Shifts Essential In 2022


Change creates opportunity, but not every company is able to respond quickly enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Others may respond too quickly, before they properly understand the implications. At the start of a typical year, optimism is in plentiful supply. Any positive trend is seen as continuing, and any negative is seen as turning around. Normally the later in the year that... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 20


Synopsys' Twan Korthorst explains how PDKs can help accelerate the photonic IC design process by offering building blocks such as several types of waveguides, passive devices like splitters, combiners, and filters, along with active devices such as phase shifters, detectors, semiconductor optical amplifiers, and lasers. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster examines IC and ASIC design trends, including... » read more

Facing Off Against Growing Chip Design Complexity


The semiconductor industry continues to face incredible pressures to deliver higher levels of performance in a smaller area, with lower power demands. From high-performance systems-on-chip for 5G mobile devices and network infrastructure to the radio-frequency transceivers that enable autonomous vehicles and the industrial Internet of Things, today’s applications demand a reduced profile, pai... » read more

The March Toward Chiplets


The days of monolithic chips developed at the most advanced process nodes are rapidly dwindling. Nearly everyone working at the leading edge of design is looking toward some type of advanced packaging using discrete heterogeneous components. The challenge now is how to shift the whole chip industry into this disaggregated model. It's going to take time, effort, as well as a substantial reali... » read more

3D-IC Reliability Degrades With Increasing Temperature


The reliability of 3D-IC designs is dependent upon the ability of engineering teams to control heat, which can significantly degrade performance and accelerate circuit aging. While heat has been problematic in semiconductor design since at least 28nm, it is much more challenging to deal with inside a 3D package, where electromigration can spread to multiple chips on multiple levels. “Be... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 14


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster checks out design and verification language adoption trends in FPGA projects, including testbench methodologies and assertion languages. Cadence's Veena Parthan finds that giving electric vehicle batteries a second life as energy storage devices can extend their useful life by 5 to 8 years, but a lack of standardization in EV batteries poses challenges. Synopsys... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools, IP, design Codasip launched a new organization within the company to support the development and commercialization of technical innovations in key applications including security, functional safety, and AI/ML. "As semiconductor scaling is showing its limits, there is an obvious need for new ways of thinking. We will be working with universities, research institutes and strategic partner... » read more

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