Experts At The Table: The Growing Signoff Headache


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss signoff issues with Rob Aitken, an ARM fellow; Sumbal Rafiq, director of engineering at Applied Micro; Ruben Molina, product marketing director for timing signoff at Cadence; Carey Robertson, director of product marketing for Calibre extraction at Mentor Graphics; and Robert Hoogenstryd, senior director of marketing for ... » read more

Beyond Software: The Virtual-Machine Supply System


It’s no secret that EDA and IP companies have had to expand their coverage into the larger system market, thanks to changes in the semiconductor supply chain. Around 2000, the industry was very fragmented. Mobile-chip and IP vendors worked with handset makers, who then partnered with operating-system (OS) suppliers and finally network operators. The next 12 years resulted in various combinati... » read more

Taking Aim At Big Data


By Ed Sperling As the Internet of Things bridges the gap between the mobile and big data worlds, EDA and IP vendors increasingly are looking well beyond their usual boundaries. How successful they are at moving upward into a market that is far less price-sensitive remains to be seen. But from a technology standpoint, at least, the issues encountered by data centers and cloud providers are ... » read more

Design Topology Requires Physical Data


By Ann Steffora Mutschler To best understand a design topology and make decisions on clock/register gating, vector sets are required for the RTL tools to understand how to gate clocks and registers. However, if certain constraints are set on all enabled signals in RTL they can be re-used for gating clocks and registers downstream where enablers are not available—even without needing a ... » read more

Simple Economics


By Jon McDonald I was watching one of the MIT OpenCourseWare videos the other day. It was one of the lectures on Computer Science. I believe it was Prof. Robert Gallager who made a statement that really got me thinking: “Increasingly, system computational complexity has little impact on cost because of chip technology.” From a hardware perspective I initially had a bit of trouble with t... » read more

Communicate, eXecute And Translate, Oh My!


This paper describes a model-driven development approach that leverages modeling efforts to validate functionality and transform high level models into forms that are useful at the next development step. It includes an example of one company's motivations for adopting such an approach, the methodology they adopted, and the value they found in using an MDD flow. To download this white paper,... » read more

Experts At The Table: Verification Nightmares


By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down with Shabtay Matalon, ESL marketing manager in Mentor Graphics’ Design Creation Division; Bill Neifert, CTO at Carbon Design Systems; Terrill Moore, CEO of MCCI Corp., and Frank Schirrmeister, director of product marketing for system-level solutions at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: Where does power fit in? N... » read more

Design-For-DSA Industry Begins To Assemble


By Mark LaPedus The industry is aggressively pursuing directed self-assembly (DSA) as an alternative patterning technology for future chip designs. DSA, which enables fine pitches through the use of block copolymers, is in the R&D pilot line stage today. The fab tools, process flows and materials are basically ready, but there are still several challenges to bring the technology from th... » read more

Fixing DP Errors: Colors Or Rings


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the move to the 20nm manufacturing node, double patterning (DP) became a requirement. In addition, topology changes occurred that demanded very regular structures, marking a significant departure from 28nm design. As a result of this new approach, new errors are popping up, such as DP violation loops, odd cycle violations and anchor path violations. Certain... » read more

Mask Data Preparation Flow For Advanced Technology Nodes


The trend to reduce critical features dimension has dramatically increased design file size. Design tape–out flows at the 28 nm technology node handle post-OPC data files that reach hundreds of gigabytes. This trend increases at 20 nm and below. That predicts new challenges in mask data preparation flow for advanced technology nodes. We have developed a mask data preparation flow to tackle th... » read more

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