Workshops in EMEA

One of the main targets of the Cadence Academic Network is to present latest Cadence technologies to academia. Therefore, the Academic Network has organized a series of workshops on different technologies across Europe.

Advanced Verification for Academia workshop found place at CDNLive EMEA, where Dr. Niels Burkhardt from Heidelberg University and Dr. Kerstin Eder from Bristol University provided best practices how to dive into the world of UVM, e-language, functional and formal verification. All these technologies are highly relevant for the industry, as we all know, most of the effort in creating of a SoC is nowadays spent on verification, but until lately the universities were not too enthusiastic to educate students on the topic. This is changing now, but the teachers must be taught first, this is what the workshop was all about. Of course Cadence Academic Network offers support here by providing licenses, online courses, additional documentation and connects experienced users with beginners. The proceedings can be found here.

Bar Ilan university in Israel is one of our closest partners, therefore, together with professors Adam Teman and Alex Fish, we’ve organized a workshop on advanced nodes for Israeli academia, where Cadence engineers showed digital and analog solutions, which address such topics as double patterning, advanced STA and FInFet-extraction. But why do universities need advanced nodes knowledge, isn’t manufacturing of these nodes quite expensive and how comes that university get access to this confidential technology? Well, we are talking about Bar Ilan here, a member of Hiper consortium with close connections to imec and TSMC. Their latest press release about their latest tapepout is just about to be released and they are not stopping at 28nm.

Other European universities have access to other exciting technologies, e.g. ST28FDSOI and they want to create modern low-power SoCs for various applications. For this they certainly need top-notch digital tools and also recharacterization is a topic to get the best performance and lowest energy consumption. The WEEE workshop in Sweden was the perfect location to present Genus, Innovus and Liberate to students from top universities in Europe like EPFL, Lund, ETH Zurich, Oslo, Tampere and others. The socializing part of the workshop ended at 4 o’clock in the morning, so I bet some good ideas were born that evening for further collaboration and research.

What can be even better that the white night in Sweden? Maybe a beach in Taormina in Sicily? At the PRIME/SMACD conference PhD students presented their achievements, but also Cadence had to show something. The brand new Virtuoso System Design Platform was presented by Cadence Fellow Arnold Ginetti and there was immediately serious interest in exploring the possibilities of this solution, which allows extraction of parasitics on PCB, package and IC level and simulation of the design with taking these parasitics into account! First question from the academic audience was if this solution can be used to measure parasitic resistance for power electronics, where high resistivity translates into high heat and this is certainly possible. SMACD is famous for its EDA tool competition, where PhD students are introducing the software they have written to jury, which chooses the winner. The winner of this years award was Axel Hald from Robert Bosch Zentrum für Leistungselektronik, who programmed a solution how to extract parasitics of moveable MEMS parts at every point of their movement. Congratulations, Axel!

This brings us to the last workshop, the MEMS workshop for the participants of the MEMS Design Contest. The aim of the contest is to educate students how to design MEMS and co-simulate with Mixed-Signal logic, therefore Cadence, X-FAB and Coventor have organized a workshop at Cadence office in Munich, where the participants from Europe and Middle East could try out the X-FAB PDK and Coventor MEMS simulator. The results of the Design Contest will be announced at CDNLive EMEA 2018, so I’m looking forward to see the winner.