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Xcelium Is 50% Faster on AWS's New Arm Server Chip

By Paul McLellan | 9 Dec 2019

At Re:invent, Amazon AWS announced Graviton 2, their second-generation Arm server chip. In the AWS news blog , written by Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist, he provides details. Today I would like to give you a sneak peek at the next generation of Arm-...

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annapurna labs | nitro | cloud | aws | graviton 2 | cadence cloud | neoverse | ARM
Sunday Brunch Video for 8th December 2019

By Paul McLellan | 8 Dec 2019

https://youtu.be/3gP0Z02MVps Made at Salinas River State Park (camera Carey Guo) Monday: The Photonics Summit 2019: Hybrid Lasers Tuesday: Cadence to Acquire AWR Wednesday: "If You Can Get Your Ship into Orbit, You're Halfway to An...

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sunday brunch
System in Package, Why Now?

By Paul McLellan | 6 Dec 2019

At HOT CHIPS this summer, one of the things I noticed was just how many of the designs being presented were in some form of 3D packaging with multiple die. I wrote about many of them in my post HOT CHIPS: Chipletifying Designs . At last year's HOT...

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chiplet | 3DIC | more than Moore | moore's law
Photonics Summit: Lumerical-Cadence Flow

By Paul McLellan | 5 Dec 2019

James Pond, the CTO of Lumerical, wrapped up the Photonics Summit recently. He started by giving an overview of the Lumerical-Cadence flow but the real focus of his short presentation was creating robust designs using photonics inverse design, or PID...

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curvycore | Lumerical | silicon photonics | Virtuoso | photonics
"If You Can Get Your Ship into Orbit, You're Halfway to Anywhere"

By Paul McLellan | 4 Dec 2019

I planned on using the 50th anniversary of Apollo 12 as a hook for this blog, but as it happened I was sick that week, so never wrote it, and my post missed its "launch window". Apollo 12 was from November 14 to 24,1969. I wrote ...

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rocket equation | space travel
Cadence to Acquire AWR

By Paul McLellan | 3 Dec 2019

Yesterday Cadence announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire AWR from National Instruments (NI). Cadence will pay approximately $160M and about 110 AWR employees will join us. The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 2020 after regulatory...

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RF | awr | Virtuoso
The Photonics Summit 2019: Hybrid Lasers

By Paul McLellan | 2 Dec 2019

Recently, Cadence held the fourth Photonics Summit and Workshop over two days. I attended the summit. The workshop was hands-on designing an RF photonics front-haul implementation. In fact, that was the focus of the whole summit, which was title...

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Lumerical | silicon photonics | photonics
Implementing Arm Hercules with Digital Full Flow

By Paul McLellan | 22 Nov 2019

At Arm TechCon, there was a joint presentation by Arm, Cadence, and Samsung Foundry about implementing Arm's next-generation high-performance CPU in Samsung's 5nm process. The diagram below, from Arm's segment of the presentation, shows how the whole...

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Genus | hercules | Samsung | Innovus | ARM | full flow
2nd WOSET Workshop on Open-Source EDA

By Paul McLellan | 20 Nov 2019

During ICCAD earlier in the month, there was the 2nd WOSET, which stands for Workshop on Open-Source EDA Technology. I wasn't there but Anton Klotz, who runs the Cadence Academic Network in Europe, was there and this is based on his report. I wro...

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open source eda | openroad | woset
Verifying Processor Security, Part 2

By Paul McLellan | 19 Nov 2019

This is the second post about Eli Singerman's keynote at the recent Jasper User Group. The first was Formally Verifying Processor Security. In the last couple of years, high-performance processors (not just Intel's) have been shown to be...

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Jasper User Group | formal | Jasper | JasperGold | Formal verification
Formally Verifying Processor Security

By Paul McLellan | 18 Nov 2019

Intel has had a couple of major events that totally changed their attitude to verification. The first was in 1994 when they had the Pentium floating-point divide bug and management said “don’t ever let this happen again”. In 1996, t...

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Intel | Jasper User Group | formal | Jasper | JasperGold
OpenROAD: Open-Source EDA from RTL to GDSII

By Paul McLellan | 15 Nov 2019

OpenROAD is a DARPA program to attempt to build a no-human-in-the-loop EDA flow, using only open-source software. The goal is to go from RTL to GDSII fully automatically. In a leading-edge process node. With zero DRC errors. In less than 24 hour...

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ucsd | dod | openroad | andrew kahng | darpa
What Does P≠NP Mean?

By Paul McLellan | 14 Nov 2019

Recently I wrote about computational software and said that EDA algorithms are all "intractable". That was in the post Computational Software. What does intractable mean? If you know anything about algorithms, you might have heard term...

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NP-complete | computational software | np-hard
Die-to-Die Interconnect: The UltraLink D2D PHY IP

By Paul McLellan | 13 Nov 2019

One of the big trends that has been happening somewhat below the radar is the growth of various forms of 3D packaging. I noted this at HOT CHIPS in summer, when a big percentage of the designs were not a single big die, but were multiple die in the s...

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system in package | SiP | chiplet | more than Moore | 3D packaging
The 2019 Jasper User Group

By Paul McLellan | 11 Nov 2019

Last week was the Jasper User Group meeting, the biggest annual gathering of formal verification engineers. This is the 13th meeting. Ziyad recalled the first, held at the TechMart, to which about 15 people attended. This year was the sixth since Cad...

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Jasper User Group | formal | Jasper | JasperGold | Formal verification
OpenTitan: Secure Boot with a Silicon Root of Trust

By Paul McLellan | 8 Nov 2019

At HOTCHIPS last year, Google presented its security processor Titan. You can read lots of details at my post Google's Titan: How They Stop You Slipping a Bogus Server into Their Datacenter . Titan provides a silicon root of trust (RoT) ...

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opentitan | open source hardware | google | open source
Computational Software

By Paul McLellan | 7 Nov 2019

This is the third post in a series on computation in EDA and adjacent markets. The previous two were Computation and the Data Explosion and Computational Hardware . All EDA algorithms are computationally intractable, in that it is impossible to ...

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computational software
Tempus Power Integrity Solution

By Paul McLellan | 6 Nov 2019

One of the challenges in leading-edge nodes today is the resistivity of the interconnect. One day, new interconnect materials such as ruthenium (Ru) might help, but for now, we have copper interconnect, which requires a liner made from a relatively h...

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Tempus | Voltus | signoff
Dead Ends

By Paul McLellan | 5 Nov 2019

Sometimes something comes along that looks like it is a portent of things to come, but then turns out to be a technological dead end. For example, in the 1990s, it seemed that you couldn't go to the mailbox or rent a video without getting an AOL...

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automotive | Breakfast Bytes
IEDM 2019 Preview

By Paul McLellan | 4 Nov 2019

Coming up in the beginning of December is the 65th International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM). The slightly strange name comes about because this is the 65th, meaning it started in the fifties, long before integrated circuits had been invented. In...

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IEDM
Computational Hardware

By Paul McLellan | 1 Nov 2019

This is the second part of a three-part series of posts on computation. The first part, Computation and the Data Explosion , appeared yesterday. Nothing is really as complex as a modern SoC. The AMD Zen2 chiplet contains nearly 4 billion transistors...

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computational software | computation
Computation and the Data Explosion

By Paul McLellan | 31 Oct 2019

Everywhere you look these days, you get told that there is a data explosion going on. A Boeing 787 generates half-a-terabyte of data per flight. Facebook has 2.5 billion users. Five billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. This impacts the s...

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computational software | computation
Implementing Automotive Radar on Tensilica Processors

By Paul McLellan | 30 Oct 2019

The big controversy about sensors in autonomous driving is whether lidar is essential. Radar has improved significantly in resolution and so I like to phrase the question as to whether radar is getting better faster than lidar is getting cheaper. Tod...

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automotive | radar | fmcw | ADAS
Photonics Summit and Workshop 2019

By Paul McLellan | 29 Oct 2019

Once again Cadence and Lumerical are hosting the two-day Photonics Summit and Workshop. The two events are not interdependent, you can attend either or both. However, they do have a common theme: The Convergence of RF and Photonics. 5G, and espe...

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curvycore | Lumerical | silicon photonics | Virtuoso | photonics
Level-4 Autonomous Trucks Are on the Road Already

By Paul McLellan | 28 Oct 2019

I already wrote two posts about the recent automotive day at the Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley Reinvents the Wheel and The California DMV on Autonomy. Today it is the turn of trucks. Given that a truck costs about $200-2...

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automotive | trucks | dmv | autonomous vehicles

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