Designing For Energy Efficiency


Swiss watchmakers have nothing to worry about for the moment. As top-name companies crowd into the wearable market with full-featured watches, limits on battery life and frequent charges undoubtedly will limit their popularity. Smart watches look cool or clunky, depending upon your perspective, but none of them lasts long enough between charges to be a serious market contender. That's certai... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 16


Cadence’s Richard Goering follows Si2’s move into SPICE modeling following the acquisition of the Compact Model Council. Combining standards groups is a growing trend these days. Mentor’s Colin Walls points to the demise of reset buttons. You can always trip a circuit breaker, and usually turn off a device by pulling out the battery, but a reset button is simpler. Where did they go? ... » read more

The Brave New World Of FinFETs


SoCs using 16nm and 14nm finFETs are expected to begin rolling out next year using a 20nm back-end-of-line process. While the initial performance and power numbers are looking very promising, the challenges of designing and building these complex chips are daunting—and there are more problems on the way. First, the good news. Initial results from foundries show a 150% improvement in perfor... » read more

Transient Current Crunch


When Intel talks, people listen. So when Intel executive VP Dadi Perlmutter said in a keynote at ISSCC in 2012 that transient power noise was one of the most limiting aspects of the chip design process—and how the package and the board inductance are limiting how low they can take the supply voltage—it showed the gravity of the challenge of effectively managing transient power. Transient po... » read more

Reliability Challenges In 16nm FinFET Design


As the IC industry rapidly adopts the 16nm technology node, IC designers are faced with a new wave of reliability challenges. The 16nm node has introduced several changes in the way that the devices are fabricated and how the metal stack-up is built. On one hand designers gain speed, leakage and density improvements. On the other, reliability engineers need to address the narrowing electromigra... » read more

Buying And Selling EDA Companies


By Ed Sperling Buying companies is the easy part. Integrating them is the hard part. It’s also the point where most acquisitions that go awry actually run into problems. There are widely different strategies for how to accomplish integration. Sometimes they work, other times they don’t. And sometimes both companies are surprised by the outcome—for better or worse. “Either you thi... » read more

Power And Signal Line Electromigration Design And Reliability Validation Challenges


This white paper describes EM integrity analysis for power and signal lines. It outlines the various process and design trends that are increasing the likelihood of EM-induced failures in a design and looks at conventional verification techniques for EM integrity and contrasts those with what is required for advanced process nodes. To download this paper, click here. » read more