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It’s no secret that the bulk of time running simulations is spent on the testbench side. You can throw as many cores as you want at the DUT when you’re running RTL tests, but let's face it, it’s the testbench itself that’s bottlenecking you. Let’s say it takes thirty minutes to run the testbench side, and thirty minutes to run the tests themselves. You can use multi-core parallelism to massively shrink the DUT time, but…

Some things in semiconductor manufacturing sound made up when you first hear about them. Through silicon vias? You're joking, right? Chemical-mechanical polishing/planarization (CMP)? You mean after all that super thousand-times-cleaner-than-an-operating...

PCI-SIG Developer’s Conference 2017 was held in Santa Clara, California in June this year where several hundred customers from more than a hundred unique companies visited the conference. The next-generation PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 specification was announced with plans for ratification in 2019. The announcement had a supporting quote by Cadence confirming our long-term commitment to developing products for PCIe…

In October 2016, an 18-wheeler truck traveled 120 miles in the US and delivered 50,000 cans of beer. Nothing remarkable in that, except that the truck drove itself while a driver on board relaxed. Such tests are happening in Europe as well. Keeping in...

Here’s an experiment to try: in a quiet (but crowded) Auditorium, drop a stack of plates.

Hypothesis: At the first splinters of the crash, all eyes will jerk to the source of the sound.

You probably won’t get many people listening harder to find out what happened. Yes, our hearing can give us a lot of information, too—it can indicate direction, distance, magnitude, and even give some ideas about what happened…

The idea of BarCamp was established the first time by the Internet pioneer Tim O’Reilly in 2003 at his farm in San Francisco Bay. The invited people were developers, journalists, programmers, start-up-entrepreneur and thinkers...

The afternoon of the first day of SEMICON West was taken up by a series of presentations and a panel session called the China Innovation and Investment Forum. The participants were:

• Lung Chu, SEMI China (moderator)
• Hing Wong of Walden Internation...

Recently the Linley Group held their IoT Hardware Conference. Mike Demler kicked off with an overview of the IoT market, and on the second day Linley Gwenapp presented a deeper dive into IoT chips (leaving out processors available as IP blocks). Cadence...

After leaving the title of yesterday's post in German, the obvious place to go for the next stop on the summer of computer museums is Germany.

If you ask people which was the first digital computer, the answer tends to vary with the respondent...

Fehlerkultur is apparently untranslatable into English, at least according to Michael Würtenburger, the head of BMW car IT. His best try was "no-blame organization." His theme echoed many other presenters during the two days, that the automotive industry...

https://youtu.be/IE1B-CmmtSs

Coming from Cadence building 10 patio (camera Paula Jones)

Monday: Linley Group Looks at the IoT Market

Tuesday: SEMICON China Panel

Wednesday: Integrated Virtual Dummy Metal Fill

Thursday: Dare to be Different

Friday...

The use of silicon photonics allows semiconductor designers to leverage the billions of dollars invested in existing manufacturing facilities, integrating electronics and optical on the same die or in the same package. Breakfast Byte’s blogger Paul McLellan has written quite a few excellent blogs about Silicon Photonics. In one …

Hefty books give many people shivers, especially in the tech world. ‘Table of Contents’ often comes to rescue and lets the learner scroll to a topic of interest. However, going through many and various chapters to learn one specific item is tedious and...

Rich Kennewick gave the keynote on the second day of the Linley IoT Hardware Conference recently. He is the CEO of a company called Voicebox and his keynote was Enabling Voice in the IoT. I had not heard of Voicebox and that is because they don't sell...

There has been a lot of news lately about manufacturing under the “Make In India” banner. In the last ten days alone, the Kalyani Group has announced the country’s first-ever private missile subsystems manufacturing facility in partnership...

In this week’s Whiteboard Wednesdays video Gerard Andrews discusses the three areas of smart speakers that require high-performance audio DSPs to process these features.

https://youtu.be/sf6_bFuyLi0

Back in about 2001, when I was last working for Cadence, Cadence started bringing in a lot of executives from Intel. We had merged custom IC and digital IC engineering and I was running the merged marketing groups. We had a lot of customer commitments...

Do you access Cadence Support Portal (https://support.cadence.com) often?

If yes, you may be interested to know what has been happening to the site lately. There have been many enhancements and changes!

If you have not visited us recently, you may be...

Yes, it's true. After who knows how many years, EDPS is not going to be in Monterey, but in Milpitas. They still seem to be keeping the dolphin logo though. So, yes, dolphins in Milpitas.

EDPS is the Electronic Design Process Symposium. It is a relatively...

Historically, one of the great challenges that analog and mixed-designers face has been accounting for the effect of process variation on their design. Minimizing the effect of process variation is an important consideration because it directly impacts the cost of a design. From Pelgrom’s Law (1), it is understood that the device mismatch due to process variation decreases as the square root of increasing device area…

Cadence Online Support has this Rapid Adoption Kit (RAK) on Rigid-Flex in Allegro PCB Editor 17.2 that introduces a flow to define unique stackups by physical zone. The Cross Section Editor in 17.2 has been enhanced to support multiple stackup definitions including support for mask and coating layers. The primary driver for this enhancement is Rigid- Flex applications where it’s common to have different fabrics across…

This week we move to Britain. The industrial revolution started in the Midlands there, and I highly recommend visiting Blists Hills Museum (near Ironbridge which is the first...you'll never guess...iron bridge, from 1779). This is truly the cradle of...

The concept of Save and Restore is simple: instead of re-initializing your simulation every time you want to run a test, only initialize it once. Then you can save the simulation as a “snapshot” and re-run it from that point to avoid hours of initialization times. It used to be inconvenient. Using this feature in simulators could have massive productivity gains, but not all users made the most of it due to…

How's that for click bait? But it's actually true.I didn't know what the SDI of Samsung SDI actually stood for. So I tried to discover. It is harder than you think to find out, partially because the answer is a bit too cute, and so I guess they stopped...