When it comes to system-on-chip verification, two trends have become painfully obvious: it is expensive and it takes too long. Consider, for example, that the most expensive parts of today’s SoC design flow are the tasks where the engineer must engage in direct manual effort or expend energy making decisions. In the case of verification, far too much time and money are wasted on tasks that don’t add value, such as trying to figure out how supposedly-correct intellectual property (IP) is actually working, debugging “dumb” errors or deciding what signals to record in … Read More → "Visibility Enhancement Technology Confronts the Visibility Issue with Full-Chip Simulation"

Design For Manufacturing (DFM) was a headline darling for a while and somehow disappeared off the radar, even as debates continued as to whether all the DFM fuss was about nothing. In fact, much of what constitutes DFM, originally implemented as point tools by young upstart companies, has quietly been subsumed into mainstream flows by mainstream tool providers, thanks in part to the traditional EDA start-up/buy-up cycle.

Fundamentally, design and verification have gone from modeling the idealized results of a manufacturing process to modeling the actual manufacturing steps in much greater detail. The criticality and accuracy … Read More → "Dueling DFMs"

Wall Street says, “Flat is the New Up!” GSA says, “Semiconductor sales for 2008 totaled $252 billion and dropped 6%, compared to 2007 sales of $268 billion.” California’s unemployment rate hit a record 11.2 percent in March 2009, allegedly the worst since the Great Depression! In our own world, EE Times reports: “The unemployment rate for all engineers jumped from 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 to 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2009, IEEE said.” And Nostradamus predicted the end of the world… For businesses, it’s all about increasing productivity, maximizing ROI, accelerating time to market, … Read More → "Demonstrating Targeted ROI"

I have to confess a weakness – I love trade shows/exhibitions. I enjoy being involved in designing, creating and setting up trade show booths, enjoy working on a booth and talking to new people, and enjoy walking the aisles and learning about new products and new companies, particularly at a crowded show where there is a special buzz. I believe that, when properly used, they are an efficient weapon in the promotional arsenal and can easily repay the investment by the exhibitors and that, when properly used, they are an efficient way of adding to professional knowledge and … Read More → "A Nice DATE in Nice"

It’s all about degrees of freedom. The more of them you have, the more options you have. In the mechanical world, we think of it primarily as the number of dimensions within which you can move: a universal joint can bend in any direction because it has three axes of rotation, one for each of the three spatial dimensions. Three degrees of freedom. When an ant walks on a beach ball, even though it’s a 3-D object, it has only two degrees of freedom because it’s constrained to the surface of the ball. … Read More → "Managing More Freedom"