What Just Happened?


Boy that went by fast. One minute, I’m waking up a little groggy on New Year’s Day, wondering whether the silicon industry is ever going to rebound. The next minute, it’s today and the industry had a good year, and is, in many ways, a completely different animal than it was 12 months ago. Innovation is evolutionary, sure. But if you really think about 2013, you can make an argument tha... » read more

Cracking The Tough Nut Using Formal Methods


Pranav Ashar, CTO of Real Intent, assured a packed room of researchers and practitioners of formal methods at the recent FMCAD conference: “Static verification is being used in the verification of designs. Every major chip out there is using static methods for sign-off today.” He used an analogy of cracking a nut. “There’s a right way and a wrong way and if you don’t pick the right me... » read more

A Night to Remember: EDA Back to the Future


I had the pleasure to attend the EDA: Back to the Future event at the Computer History Museum on Oct. 16.   There were over 230 guests to raise money for the EDA Oral History Project at the Museum.   There were industry luminaries honored at the event, and I did red carpet interviews with many of them as they arrived including Joe Costello, Simon Segars, and Penny Herscher.  As I did the i... » read more

EDA Shows Continued Growth


EDA and IP revenue jumped 3.8% in Q2 to $1.65 billion, up from $1.59 billion in the same period in 2013, spurred by the need for new tools to design, create and verify SoCs using 16/14nm finFETs. Sequentially, the numbers reported by the EDA Consortium were down slightly from Q1, but the four-quarter moving average—considered a more reliable number because tools sales are long-term investm... » read more

Critical Choices


There’s been a lot of talk about what’s good enough. Is 10 hours of battery life enough? If the tradeoff is between a smaller battery and extra hour of battery life, which is more important? Those kinds of discussions are at the heart of consumer electronics. Ultra-thin smart phones are more attractive than fat ones, and they’re easier to put in your pocket. But a new kind of discussio... » 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

Should EDA Heads Be In The Cloud?


Consider the following two comments about cloud computing and electronic design automation: “Over time everybody will move to the cloud in EDA at least in some extent.”—Raik Brinkmann, CEO of OneSpin Solutions. “We put a substantial effort into that, and of all the things we've done in the last 25 years this is probably the single one where the result is essentially zero. I don't ... » read more

Layers Of Business And Tech Issues


Slice an onion in half and one onion pretty much looks like any other onion. Peel it back, layer by layer, and put it under a powerful microscope, and each layer suddenly looks very different. The same is true for semiconductors. To the outside world, a chip is a chip and an interconnect is an interconnect. Each one has different specs, but even the parts that make up those chips look remar... » read more

Changes And Challenges


At 130nm, the shift to copper interconnects and 300mm wafer sizes was considered to be the most difficult transition in its long and incredibly efficient history. The next chapter will be even tougher. It’s not that change is a foreign concept to semiconductor design and manufacturing. In fact, it’s probably the only constant over the past 50 years. But in the past, those changes tended ... » read more

RTL Signoff


Piyush Sancheti, Atrenta's vice president of product marketing, talks with Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering about where the pain points are in design and why RTL signoff has become so important. [youtube vid=8Ra1_VmzW50] » read more

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