The Architect’s Dilemma And Closing The Loop With Implementation


Gordon Moore has left a mark on our industry. Moore's Law has shaped decades of development. The EDA industry has been moving up the layers of abstraction to increase the productivity and predictability of design flows in our efforts to address the ever-increasing complexity of semiconductors and electronics developments. I had written about it in "Chasing The Next Level Of Productivity" not lo... » read more

RISC-V Disrupting EDA


The electronic design automation (EDA) industry started in the 1980s and primarily was driven by the test and PCB industries. The test industry was focused on simulation so that test vector sets could be developed and optimized. The PCB industry needed help managing complexity as system sizes grew. That complexity soon was eclipsed by IC complexity and the costs associated with making a mist... » read more

The End Of Closed EDA


In a previous life, I was a technologist for a large EDA company. One of my primary responsibilities in that position involved talking to a lot of customers to identify their pain points, and what new tools we could develop that would ease their problems. You would think that would be an easy task, but it certainly was not the case. For example, if you ask a developer what their biggest frus... » read more

Steering The Semiconductor Industry


Progress in semiconductors has been one of the most successful engineering feats, and the industry has ridden an exponential curve longer than anything else in history. It is also a highly conservative industry that has pushed away many disruptive changes in favor of small incremental changes that minimize risk. There have been significant changes over the decades, and they often required a ... » read more

Digital Twins Deciphered


Ever since Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics in 2016, a new phrase has become more common in the semiconductor industry – the digital twin. Exactly what that is, and what impact it will have on the semiconductor industry, is less clear. In fact, many in the industry are scratching their heads over the term. The initial reaction is that the industry has been creating what are now termed digi... » read more

The Rest Is History


I recently fielded some questions on the evolution of Electronic System Level design. The questions started me thinking about how ESL is being applied today and what effect some of the historical assumptions might be having on ESL’s perceived use cases. It’s interesting that we are at a point to consider historical assumptions about ESL. Looking it up, Wikipedia claims that the term ESL ... » read more