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The Electronic System Design Alliance (fka EDAC) has been organizing evening meetings every 6 months or so, under the auspices of the emerging companies. These are hosted by Jim Hogan. The latest one took place last week at Cadence and was about two...

You heard it right! It’s Virtuoso Abstract Generator, the popular library modeling tool that lets you create abstracts from detailed layout information in various formats. Abstracts, when used for routing instead of full layouts, result in improved performance of place-and-route tools, such as the Cadence® Innovus™ Implementation System and the Cadence® Encounter™ Digital Implementation System (EDI System).…

Automotive was huge at CES. A lot of it went for the glamour without really having much electronics, concept cars which will never see the light of day. But increasingly cars are about electronics. As I told someone recently, a couple of years ago, nobody...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Nimrod Reiss takes a closer look at the verification challenges engineers face when working on interconnect designs.

https://youtu.be/C0ym6CWDwZE

It's the start of the year, plus the Consumer Electronics Show is over. I've already written about the things that I thought were most significant. One area where I am sure we will be hearing a lot during 2017 is security.

We ended...

As you incrementally build your design and decompose the layout geometry into masks or colors, you may want to change the color already applied to a shape or a set of shapes. At the same time, you may want the color of some shapes to stay unchanged. So, you lock the color on such shapes, because, by default, color shifting is not permitted on locked shapes. But what about the conflicts that occur when you end up locking…

Despite all of the recent political tensions, Russia remains an attractive market for microelectronics and EDA software. Cadence has two offices in Russia: one medium-sized R&D office in the center of Moscow, and one office in Zelenograd, outside of Moscow...

Steve Mollenkopf, the CEO of Qualcomm, gave one of the keynotes at the Consumer Electronics Show recently. Of course Qualcomm is historically a huge fabless semiconductor company that sells mostly into the mobile market with chips under the Snapdragon...

What is Bluetooth 5? 4.2? Bluetooth Classic? Bluetooth Smart? Low Energy? The naming is confusing, for sure.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (which sounds like a dental convention) announced Bluetooth 5 last June and officially adopted it in December...

The latest RISC-V workshop was held at Google. In the middle of the day, there was an interesting presentation by Eric Grosse. He used to be VP of security at Google but he has recently returned to more hands-on engineering work. His talk was titled

https://youtu.be/ympju1edOh8

Coming from my office at Cadence

Monday: Review of Circuits and Systems for Security and Privacy

Tuesday: Steve Mollenkopf's keynote from CES

Wednesday: Automotive at CES

Thursday: Security in 2016 and 2017

The ESD Alliance Emerging Companies have been organizing a series of evening events, sometimes panel sessions, sometimes interviews. The thread tying them all together is that they are hosted by Jim Hogan (who is an independent investor these days, although...

Happy New Year, and the first week of January means it is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Some people hate it, but I like the way that you get a look at what consumers are going to have on their shopping list...or not...without anyone curating what...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, the first in a three-part series on Ethernet, Scott Jacobson explores what our world looked like before Ethernet and other networking standards came about.  For more information on Cadence Verification IP (VIP) please visit: https://ip.cadence.com/ipportfolio/verification-ip/simulation-vip

www.youtube.com/watch

Every year, UBM, the parent company of EE TImes and EDN (and the organizer of several shows such as ESC and ARM TechCon) has a competition known as the ACE Awards. ACE stands for Annual Creativity in Electronics. They have been going for a long time,...

https://youtu.be/33fiVk2BoKo

Coming from Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas at during Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

Monday: The Palladium team one the ACE award for Design Team of the Year 2016

Tuesday: Highlights from CES

Wednesday: ESD Alliance Jim...

At CDNLive in Taiwan last year, MediaTek presented their experiences with Perspec System Verifier. This post assumes that you know the basics about Perspec. If you need an introduction then look at my earlier posts:

• A Perspective on Perspec
• Perspec...

Most of the PCB designers I know are creatures of habit just like I was...

we have our favorite colors, layer names, customized keyboard and our number one goal is to see how many nets we can route in one day. Very rarely do we change – but when we do it’s either because we changed employers or we are forced to because the tried and true processes don’t work any longer.

Can you relate?

Those of you…

At the recent IEDM in San Francisco, Coventor organized a panel titled BEOL Barricades: Navigating Future Semiconductor Yield, Reliability, and Cost Challenges. The BEOL, back end of line, is the metal, although where it begins and ends, as you will see...

Dolby Laboratories was founded by Ray Dolby. I always thought he was English, but it turns out he was American, although the company was indeed founded in Britain, back in 1965, hence my confusion. It moved to San Francisco a couple of years later. For...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, the last in a three-part series on automotive functional safety, Charles Qi covers active safety  and how Cadence Design IP implements these features.

https://youtu.be/6IDx7vVA6YE

Just before the holidays I gave in and purchased an Amazon Echo, the small hockey puck one called the Echo Dot. It was on sale for under $40. To be honest, I don't need another gadget and it doesn't do a whole lot of things that I need doing. Plus, I...

You probably know that DAC is run by a company called MP Associates. It was started by Marie and Pat Pistilli (hence MP). Unfortunately Marie Pistilli died earlier this year. What is less well known is that Pat Pistilli started DAC and is probably the...

https://youtu.be/bGsKR-RG0fY

Coming from Mission San Juan Bautista, California

Monday: Interview with Pat Pistilli on the origins of EDA and of DAC

Tuesday: Amazon's Alexa voice user interface. Is VUI the new GUI?

Wednesday: Coventor panel...