Considerations For Choosing The Right Low-Power Tools


By Cheryl Ajluni Regardless of what you are designing these days, one fact holds true: Your design is only as good as the design tools you use. Gone are the days when a design could be done on the back of napkin. Today, engineers require a complex ecosystem of interworking tools to guide them through the complex design flow. This is especially true when it comes to low-power design, as i... » read more

Making Quality A Top Priority in Next-Generation Designs


By Cheryl Ajluni With system design such a complicated task these days, it is increasingly likely that designers will inadvertently overlook some details of the design process, or worse yet, simply not have the time to address them adequately. Time is readily spent focusing on things like performance, area, timing, and power, but what about something a bit more esoteric in nature—namely, qu... » read more

Custom IC Design: They Call This Progress?


By Ed Sperling For decades, analog and digital engineers have lived in completely separate worlds. The lines are blurring between those worlds, though, in complex SoCs. So far, the transition has been difficult, and most engineers predict it will get worse at future process nodes. The basic problem is that each world has functioned independently of the other from the start. They use different... » read more

Thinking Digital To Design Analog, And Vice Versa


By Ed Sperling Until several years ago, analog was a world apart from digital. Analog engineers could comfortably avoid many of the issues of Moore’s Law, viewing it as a costly bad habit with an equally bad outcome. Most analog engineers gloated privately that they could still develop chips at 250nm, or at worst 130nm, while their digital counterparts were struggling to keep up with is... » read more

Who’s Out, Who’s In


The EDA world is either doing better than most segments of the economy or coming apart at the seams, depending upon your perspective and your definition of exactly what an EDA company is. But at least one trend seems clear: As we push into the world of system-level design from chip design and SoCs instead of ASICs, the high-level trend is broader companies with more complete integrated packag... » read more

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