Old Problem, New Solutions

By Ed Sperling - 10 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Electromigration (EM) and electrostatic discharge (ESD) may not be new, but design design sophistication and tiny wires are demanding that engineering teams take a fresh look and utilize new tools to lesson the impacts of damaging electrical events. “These are certainly not new phenomenon,” said Carey Robertson, director of product marketing for Calibre at Ment... » read more

Traversing The Abstraction Landscape

By Ed Sperling - 10 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Back in the early days of semiconductor design engineers could count the number of transistors on their chip with their own two eyes. They designed and worked at the same level of design abstraction when doing the timing analysis. Tools were SPICE-like, maybe abstracted with slightly simpler timing models than the SPICE-level transistor models. Thanks to Moore’... » read more

Intel’s Hot New Tri-Gate Processors

By Barry Pangrle - 10 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Barry Pangrle Intel announced its newest third-generation Core processors on April 23rd. There has been much anticipation surrounding these new chips from Intel, largely because of their new 22nm tri-gate process technology used to fabricate these devices. Figure 1, from the presentation entitled, “Intel’s Revolutionary 22nm Transistor Technology,” by Mark Bohr and Kaizad Mistry, s... » read more

Experts At The Table: Hardware-Software Co-Design

By Ed Sperling - 04 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss hardware-software co-design with Frank Schirrmeister, group marketing director for Cadence’s System and Software Realization Group; Shabtay Matalon, ESL market development manager at Mentor Graphics; Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris; Narendra Konda, director of hardware engineering at Nvdia; and Jack Greenbaum, directo... » read more

Anchors Away – Anchoring and Seeding in Double Pattern Design.

By David Abercrombie - 02 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

David Abercrombie Many aspects of how double patterning (DP) affects the designer depend on the methodology used and the level of control the designer wants. One extreme in methodology and control is full two-layer design, in which the designer decomposes the entire design and tapes out two masks. The designer has complete control of the coloring, but all the responsibility and work as well. T... » read more

Experts At The Table: Hardware-Software Co-Design