Why Are S-Parameters Superior For Power Module Optimization?


A power module is a high-power switching circuit – used in electric vehicles, renewable energy, photovoltaics, wind, and many more applications – that uses insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBT) or metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors as switching elements. This paper discusses the difference in power module simulation using lumped elements and S-Parameters. Using a simple ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Liz Allan, and Gregory Haley. TSMC rolled out the second version of its 3Dblox, which creates an infrastructure for stacking chiplets and other necessary components in a package, along with a standardized way of achieving that. Two novel features are chiplet mirroring for design reuse, and what is basically sandbox for power and thermal analysis of different design elements. ... » read more

Industry Pressure Grows For Simulating Systems Of Systems


Most complex systems are designed in a top-down manner, but as the amount of electronic content in those systems increases, so does the pressure on the chip industry to provide high-level models and simulation capabilities. Those models either do not exist today, or they exist in isolation. No matter how capable a model or simulator, there never will be one that can do it all. In some cases,... » read more

What Happened To Portable Stimulus?


In June 2018, Accellera released the initial version of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS), a new verification language that was slated to be the first new abstraction defined within EDA for a couple of decades. So what happened to it? Apart from a few updates at DVCon, there appears to be little talk about it today. However, the industry has its head down trying to make it work, ... » read more

A Shift Left Strategy Is One Part Of A Holistic Approach To IC Design Verification


The whole is more than the sum of its parts. –Aristotle A machine is nothing more than a collection of nuts, bolts, wheels, gears, wires, pipes, chains, and what have you. And yet, when they are all connected up properly, magic happens. Instead of a pile of parts, you have a car, or a dishwasher, or a nuclear reactor. The connections and interactions between all those parts turns the whole... » read more

What Does Shift Left With Calibre Mean For IC Designers


Driven by the world’s seemingly insatiable demand for electronics that constantly do more faster, integrated circuit (IC) design companies are continuously seeking ways to profitably deliver products with more functionality, reliability, and performance while reducing time-to-market. To accomplish this, a well-planned shift left strategy can free up critical time and resources in delivery sch... » read more

Blog Review: September 27


Siemens' Dirk Hartmann examines how a continual improvement in predictive capability processing and algorithms enables the evolution of simulation performance and highlights two areas that underpin most simulation tools. Synopsys' Ian Land, Jason Niatas, and Marc Serughetti note that digital twins can be used from the chip level through sub-systems and up to the system level to examine perfo... » read more

Blog Review: September 20


Siemens' Patrick Hope considers the unique attributes of materials used in flex and rigid-flex PCB designs and how they are constructed. Synopsys' Kenneth Larsen and Shekhar Kapoor find that the increased impact of thermal, signal integrity, and other multi-physics effects on multi-die systems calls for looking at the whole system, from technology to dies and package together. Cadence's V... » read more

Why Chiplets Don’t Work For All Designs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss use cases and challenges for commercial chiplets with Saif Alam, vice president of engineering at Movellus; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; and Craig Bishop, CTO at Deca Technologies. What follows are excerpts... » read more

No Hot Products


While marketers strive to launch the next “hot” product, engineers struggle to prevent literally hot products! A recent breakthrough in thermal modeling comes just in time as electronic component manufacturers and their OEM customers increasingly battle thermal design issues. Analog electronic component manufacturers have traditionally provided models in SPICE format so customers can sim... » read more

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