The Design Chronicles Blogs

Parasitic extraction is a critical piece in design signoff. It translates geometry information such as wires and shapes into electrical properties such as Rs and Cs. Together with analysis technologies including simulation, timing, and EM/IR tools, parasitic...

Vehicles with varying levels of autonomous driving capabilities are logging millions of miles on roadways. Still, a new survey, released recently by the Kelly Blue Book auto information service , finds that most people still want the ability to take control...

Collaboration was, of course, the presiding theme at the TSMC Open Innovation Platform® Ecosystem Forum on Thursday, Sept. 22, at the San Jose Convention Center. This year, the keynote talks focused on four key application pillars: mobile, high-performance...

Popular since the 1970s for general-purpose computing and supercomputing, floating point is increasingly in demand for compute-intensive digital signal processing applications like sensor fusion, equalization, vision processing, radar processing, and...

Ahmadreza Farsaei doesn’t enjoy being bored—and this is a great thing for the electronics/photonics industry. Long a mainstay of academic research, photonics—the science of generating, controlling, and detecting light—is moving quickly into mainstream...

Traditionally, photonic ICs (PICs) have consisted of a few components and are designed as specialized, standalone devices. We’re now seeing applications for integrated photonics become proven and commercialized. As a result, there’s a demand for higher...

Automotive ICs are expected to last 15 years, yet they are vulnerable to incredible environment- and stress-induced failures. As the industry eventually moves to full automation for vehicles, functional safety will always be a key consideration for the...

Do you have a clever way to accelerate Montgomery modular multiplication? That would be your challenge as an entrant in the Global Tensilica Design Contest. Abstracts are due September 16. The aim of the contest, hosted by the Cadence Academic Network...

The internet is at a crossroads. From the internet of things to big data, smart grids, smart cities, intelligent transportation, and e-health, online applications are continuing to transform our lives. But as more network objects become capable of sensing...

At the Design Automation Conference in June, I stopped by Cadence’s booth for a demo of our RocketSim parallel simulation engine. (Cadence acquired Rocketick, who developed the tool, back in April.) Dave Lidrbauch, sr. principal product manager, led the...

With a portfolio including dedicated automotive ICs, discrete and power transistors, MEMs and specialized imaging sensors, and digital ASICs, STMicroelectonics is a leading provider of smart driving and internet of things (IoT) technologies. On June 7...

It’s a huge conundrum: as process nodes shrink, design times grow longer, while project schedules remain the same or get reduced. Growing the design team isn’t always an option. “There are not enough human beings in North America who know...

For all that we’ve heard about the impending demise of Moore’s Law, there is a pipeline full of new materials, device architectures, and techniques that offers promise to further extend semiconductor scaling. That was the takeaway from a “Secrets of Semiconductor...

What kinds of techniques are you employing to address physical and electrical challenges at advanced nodes? At 10nm and beyond, you’ll need to start addressing coloring. When you get to 7nm, color-aware cell placement, metal cutting rules, and density...

Women in the U.S. earn half of the bachelor’s degrees, with only 18% in computer science and less than 20% in engineering. Roughly 18% of engineers in the country are female. “The world’s greatest challenges need new STEM ideas, and half of the world...

One of the new experiences that Cadence brought to DAC this year were the Experience Rooms in the booth. In these themed rooms, technical experts from a variety of companies shared use cases and design techniques on specific topics. On Monday, June 6...

Which is more critical for you: simulation speed or accuracy? Can you have it all? As consumers continue to thirst for more and better features in their electronic products, design complexity grows, silicon manufacturing costs increase, and competition...

Smart, connected medical implants are potentially among the most worthwhile of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. (Who really needs a smart water fountain for their cat?) The opportunity to improve or even save lives is one of the things that drives UC...

For Sameer Halepete, the challenges of staying ahead of Moore’s Law are only making chip design more fun. “In the past, you had ideas to improve power, cost, performance…people would just say, go to the next process node. Now that the option of going...

With self-driving cars on the horizon, automotive design is one of the big topics at this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin. During Monday morning’s keynote, Lars Reger, CTO of the Automotive Business Unit at NXP Semiconductors, took...

Every year, the industry’s brightest minds in static timing analysis (STA) and EDA gather to discuss the latest challenges and solutions at the Tau Workshop. Earlier this spring, Cadence’s Praveen Ghanta, sr. principal software engineer, and Igor Keller...

One powerful countermeasure against chronic disease is to detect and treat it early. Doing so calls for collecting and monitoring vast amounts of data. In Dr. Jerald Yoo’s view, this is the perfect job for wearable healthcare devices. “Wearable...

We now almost take for granted that computing power can be wrapped around our wrists or worn on a chain as a necklace. An array of wearable, mobile, military, and medical devices now rely on flex and rigid-flex PCBs to support the small form factor and...

It’s an ongoing challenge faced by universities across the globe: How to teach advanced-node design to the next generation of SoC engineers when budgets are tight and access to the latest tools and technologies is limited? For Dr. Matthew Swabey...

Volunteering in her daughter’s classroom one day, Professor Laleh Behjat noticed how enthusiastic the 10-year-olds were when it was time to pick bits of clay, paper, and other materials off the floor. The teacher had turned clean-up time into a game....