Blog Review: April 2


Mentor’s Nazita Saye compares roadway roundabouts to networked systems. One roundabout works fine, but add in a bunch of them and you have a massive traffic jam. How many roundabouts are in your design? Cadence’s Richard Goering interviews Stan Kroliskoski, chair of the IEEE Design Automation Standards Committee, about four working groups on EDA standards and what’s ahead. Speaking ... » read more

Big Shift In SoC Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss software-driven verification with Ken Knowlson, principal engineer at Intel; Mark Olen, product manager for the Design Verification Technology Division of Mentor Graphics; Steve Chappell, senior manager for CAE technology and verification at Synopsys; Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System Development Suite at Cadenc... » read more

New Approaches For Reliability


The definition of reliability hasn’t budged since the invention of the IC, but how to achieve it is starting to change. In safety-critical systems, as well as in markets such as aerospace, demands for reliability are so rigorous that they often require redundant circuitry—and for good reason. A PanAmSat malfunction in 1998 caused by tin whisker growth wiped out pagers for 45 million use... » read more

How Much Will That Chip Cost?


From the most advanced process nodes to the trailing edge of design there is talk about the skyrocketing cost of developing increasingly complex SoCs. At 16/14nm it’s a combination of multi-patterning, multiple power domains and factoring in physical and proximity effects. At older nodes, it’s the shift to more sophisticated versions of the processes and new tools to work within those proce... » read more

EDA Shapes Its Future


In part one of this series, Semiconductor Engineering looked at growth within the EDA industry and the types of approaches being made to expand the scope of the markets that they serve. Scope expansion comes from the creation of new tools, the growth of companies in the IP space and the various ways in which opportunities can be found in new markets. Additional growth opportunities come from so... » read more

Distortion Effects Prevail In RF Design


It’s an exciting time for consumers of wireless devices, but it’s a challenging time for system designers who must design, analyze and verify that all of the components in those wireless devices interoperate. In wireless designs, distortion effects play an important role in the performance of RF circuits, including mixers, low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) and power amplifiers (PAs) and managi... » read more

Biggest Verification Mistakes


[getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]s today have more processors and more embedded software than ever, including drivers and middleware just to get the hardware working. This, in turn, requires more and better [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"]. Add to the challenge the fact that there is no one way to do verification and it is easy to comprehend how critical it is to for hardware and software tea... » read more

Better Software. Faster!


As virtual prototyping has seen a wide adoption over the last couple of years, it felt like the right time to work with industry leaders across multiple applications and publish a book that captures the best practices in virtual prototyping. As editor of the book: Better Software. Faster!, I had the privilege to work with some incredibly knowledgeable people who have been deploying virtual prot... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys rolled out a major new release of its place and route tool, the centerpiece of its physical design platform, offering up to 10X improvement in speed—a combination of 5X faster implementation and 2X larger capacity. Co-CEO Aart de Geus called it the most significant product in the company’s history. Synopsys also rolled out an AMS verification platform to accelerate regres... » read more

Synopsys-Coverity Deal Final


Synopsys’ acquisition of Coverity, which makes tools for testing and analyzing software, was made official yesterday. Now what? That may be the $334 million question, which is the price Synopsys paid for the 11-year-old software tools vendor. Even Synopsys’ top executives are rather candid in their uncertainty about where this deal will lead, and they made no qualms about that at the Syn... » read more

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