Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A NXP will acquire Marvell's Wi-Fi Connectivity business in an all-cash, asset transaction valued at $1.76 billion. The deal includes the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology portfolios and related assets; the business employs approximately 550 people worldwide. The deal is expected to close by calendar Q1 2020. Tools Cadence unveiled a data center-optimized FPGA-based prototyping system, ... » read more

The Rising Importance Of Design Planning


Design Planning is often overlooked in the chip design flow. The front-end designer carefully architects the design functionality to produce golden RTL. This is then poured into the synthesis engine to produce logic gates. The synthesized netlist is then thrown over the wall by the front-end designer for physical implementation. The back-end designer receives a gate-level netlist, timing con... » read more

Moving Beyond Geometries: Context-Aware Verification Improves Design Quality And Reliability


Context-aware checks integrate physical and electrical information to evaluate a wide range of design conditions, from advanced design rule compliance, to circuit and reliability verification, to design optimization and finishing. Automated context-aware checking provides designers with actionable results that improve both debugging efficiency and verification precision. Introduction Many p... » read more

Accelerating Physical Verification Productivity for Advanced Node Designs with IC Validator


Applications such as deep-learning, autonomous driving vehicles, and mobility on 5G networks fuel the need for continuous advancements in IC integration. Growing design complexity, pressure on design cycle time, process advancements and increasing verification requirements are driving the need for faster, more efficient physical verification flows. The current state-of-the-art FinFET processes ... » read more

How Qualcomm Got Faster Signoff DRC Convergence


Qualcomm Incorporated designs and markets wireless telecommunications products and services that are the foundational technologies that others build upon, from mobile processors to embedded platforms, Bluetooth products, and cellular modems. In the fast-moving mobile phone market in which Qualcomm competes, companies who can get to market more quickly gain a strong competitive advantage, along ... » read more

Physical Verification In The Cloud


Cloud computing is no longer “the next big thing”; it has become a mainstream tool for business across many industries. Our own industry of IC Design and EDA, however, has been watching the cloud trend closely from the sidelines. We have been cautious and have not embraced Cloud as much as other industries – until now. What changed this year? What is driving design companies and EDA tool ... » read more

Design For Advanced Packaging


Advanced packaging techniques are viewed as either a replacement for Moore's Law scaling, or a way of augmenting it. But there is a big gap between the extensive work done to prove these devices can be manufactured with sufficient yield and the amount of attention being paid to the demands advanced packaging has on the design and verification flows. Not all advanced packaging places the same... » read more

The Process Design Kit: Protecting Design Know-How


Once upon a time, integrated circuits (ICs) were built by the same companies that designed them. The design of an IC was tightly integrated with the manufacturing processes available within each company. In these days, when designs contained hundreds of transistors, companies modeled each feature in an IC at a first principles level, meaning each transistor or fundamental device was analyzed an... » read more

Is Cloud Computing Suitable for Chip Design?


Is semiconductor design being left behind in a cloud-dominated world? Finance, CRM, office applications and many other sectors have made the switch to a cloud-based computing environment, but the EDA industry and its users have hardly started the migration. Are EDA needs and concerns that different from everyone else? We are starting to see announcements from EDA companies, but few cheerleaders... » read more

China’s Electric Car Ambitions


China, the world’s largest car market, is also leading the charge in the electric vehicle business. But with little or no fanfare, China also wants to dominate the critical ecosystem for battery-electric vehicles and hybrids. In fact, the nation is already the world’s largest producer of batteries for electric vehicles. And it also controls a sizable part of the supply chain, such as the... » read more

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