The Road To DAC: One-On-One With Aart de Geus


Synopsys CEO Aart De Geus sounds off about the future of design and where growth will come from in the EDA market.   [youtube vid=GO-9ILL9fDg] » read more

Synopsys To Buy Virage Logic


By Ed Sperling Synopsys bought Virage Logic today for $289 million, extending its IP portfolio well beyond just standard I/O and PHY into memory, logic and processor cores. The move strengthens Synopsys’ position as an all-in-one powerhouse with IP that can fit into an integrated flow. “A big part of the value is providing building blocks that work through the SoC flow,” said Joac... » read more

The Great Divide


By Ed Sperling One size no longer fits all, and that’s causing consternation across the supply chain from established EDA vendors to point tool developers all the way up to the largest chipmakers. While the overall number of design starts for SoCs really hasn’t changed much, despite a drop in the number of companies working at the most advanced process nodes, what has changed significan... » read more

TLM 2.0: Necessary for Co-Simulation


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Transaction-level modeling – an abstracted representation of design IP above the RT level -- continues to grow in importance for architectural exploration, performance analysis, building virtual platforms for software development, and functional verification. The TLM-2.0 standard is the current industry standard for creating interoperable transaction-level models an... » read more

Unified Design Flows Require New Skill Sets


By Pallab Chatterjee With the release of the InRoute product from Mentor, three of the major EDA vendors now offer unified data model design flows that feature logic synthesis, physical synthesis, place and route, timing closure with high accuracy RC tools, and physical verification based on full process tools. These new tools were created to address the need for simultaneous Multi-Corner M... » read more

Same Industry, Different Shape


As the design industry plunges into DAC this year, it’s beginning to look like a completely different industry. It’s not the players themselves. There are still the Big Three EDA vendors, IP vendors and lots of startups. And it’s all still geared toward making chips. But the center of gravity has shifted from what was almost exclusively place and route and synthesis out to the edges of... » read more

A Shock To The System


By Ed Sperling Electrostatic discharge used to be something confined to the I/O level, and often not even as part of the core design. But at 45nm and beyond, ESD is capable of wreaking havoc across a chip, blowing out transistors, wires and the insulation between them. What was once considered a sideshow in SoC development is becoming a central and critical issue at advanced nodes. The good... » read more

Making IP Tradeoffs For Power


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Power may be expensive, but just turning off sections of a chip, lowering the voltage or using low-power manufacturing processes have their own costs. Whether using power, or managing it, there is a price. As Brani Buric, executive vice president at Virage Logic says, “Power is not free.” But fortunately, other things in a design can be traded off in order to a... » 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: How important is a high-leve... » 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

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