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, director of marketing for design... » read more

The X Factor


By Ed Sperling The number of unknowns is growing in every segment of SoC design all the way through manufacturing, raising the stakes between reliability and the tradeoffs necessary to meet market windows. Tools are available to deal with some of these unknowns, or X’s, but certainly not all of them. Moreover, no single tool can handle all unknowns, some of which can build upon other unkn... » read more

Does SoC Signoff Mean More Than RTL?


As the cost of failure continues to rise, SoC engineers see the growing importance of ensuring their work is as correct as possible as soon as possible in the design process. They cannot afford to carry errors forward from one stage to the next, where their impact grows while their causes become more obscured. This requirement is driving the shift in design exploration and handoff to the reg... » read more

Executive Briefing: Andrew Yang


By Ed Sperling Andrew Yang, president of ANSYS subsidiary Apache Design, sat down with Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering to talk about why power is becoming so important and where the future challenges lie. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: What’s the most important issue these days for chipmakers? Yang: According to the feedback we’ve gotten from our customer... » read more

Technologies For Power, Signal, Thermal, And EMI Sign-Off


This paper discusses the challenges associated with designing smaller, faster, and lower cost products. It provides an overview of Apache's power and noise solutions and how these products enable comprehensive chip-package-system convergence flow across multiple design disciplines. To download this white paper, click here. » read more

The Power Problem


For the past few years, EDA companies have been warning chipmakers that power will become the biggest issue they face at future nodes. They were right. While it may not be the only big problem—after all, the number of issues at each new tick of Moore’s Law is growing—power is certainly one of the most challenging and by far the most pervasive. In fact, the warnings about just how perni... » read more

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

DAC Is Where?


By Mike Gianfagna DAC season is upon us. I gave up counting the number of DACs I’ve attended a long time ago—when I turned 29 for the third time, I believe. This year, DAC is special in a few important ways. First of all, it’s the 50th DAC. Yes, the show has indeed been around that long. It started as a workshop with a bunch of engineers debating algorithms. For an industry that is arg... » read more

New Issues In Signoff


By Ed Sperling Signoff has always been a challenge at every stage of an SoC design flow. No matter how good a design looks, or how well a prototype works, there are still problems that can crop up at any stage of the design flow all the way into manufacturing that can leave engineering teams shaking their heads. Even at mainstream process nodes, respins are common. At advanced nodes—part... » read more

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