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Mike Muller, ARM's CTO, delivered a little history and a lot of security. Oh, and he announced a new ARM processor and a new instruction set.

First, the history. In a couple of weeks' time is the 25th anniversary of the creation of ARM. I was there...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Lou Ternullo explains the challenges of designing with QSPI interfaces at higher speeds.

https://youtu.be/Pnhxo9oXdvA

Coming back from the PCI-SIG Developer Conference Asia-Pacific Tour 2015 in Japan, and the PCI Compliance Workshop in Taipei, it was encouraging to see the engineers’ high level of interest in PCIe 4.0.

The engineers attending the conference and workshop in general were all in good moods, I wondered if it was reflective of the quality of the food that was being served to those in attendance. In Tokyo, the PCI-SIG…

The 16.6–2015 (also known as 16.6 QIR#9) Design Entry HDL (DEHDL) release contains upgraded capabilities for the Variant Editor – namely:

• Dynamic viewing of variants in the schematic editor
• Capturing variants on schematics
• Replacing a part with any other part using the Component Browser
• Support for hierarchical variants

Here are a couple videos detailing these new capabilities.

Read on for more details…

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the hottest buzzword (buzzphrase?) in electronics right now. Everyone's definition is a little different, and each time I see a presentation on IoT the number of units goes up by a few more billion. Probably the most widely...

Let's pull a paragraph out of the joint Cadence/GF press release from earlier today.

Cadence collaborated with GLOBALFOUNDRIES on the development of the Process Design Kit (PDK) for the 22FDX platform. The Cadence digital implementation tools support...

In my first real blog here, about the Cadence/imec 5nm announcement, I asked what was 5nm on a 5nm process. The answer is nothing. Creating the lithography for 5nm is a major milestone but process naming has become very misleading.

It reminds me of that...

We recently held the annual Mixed Signal Technology Summit. I blogged about it and Christine Young covered the keynote. Cadence has had a leadership position in analog and mixed-signal design for a long time, even though originally the companies that...

In this week’s Whiteboard Wednesday, Charles Qi talks about automotive functional safety and reliability standards and its importance to the automobile industry and IP and software developers.

https://youtu.be/vwaiwsRIYf4

This year's Phil Kaufman award recipient is Wally Rhines. I already knew the big picture history that Wally did a PhD at Stanford, then worked half his career for Texas Instruments before joining Mentor as CEO. I called Wally up to get some more color...

Every year one person in EDA is honored with the Phil Kaufman Award. As it says on the EDAC website:

Presented by the Electronic Design Automation Consortium and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation, this award honors an individual who has...

Recently Tesla activated Autopilot for their vehicles, which are equipped with the appropriate sensors. To prepare for this addition, they have been shipping cars and SUVs for about a year with front-facing camera and radar and a collection of sensors...

Earlier this week was the Cadence Mixed-Signal Technology Summit. Since I was the emcee, I spent the entire day there and saw all the presentations. I am not going to try and detail everything that was said in every presentation: you had to be there!...

I’m taking a brief detour from the usual product technical details this week to mention (and in most cases – remind people) that the Cadence PCB Design and SI/PI Analysis Products provide Quarterly Incremental Releases – or QIRs. You can find brief descriptions of what’s contained in each QIR here. Near the bottom of each main product section (Allegro, Sigrity, OrCad) there is a “What’s New” link…

Ever since Pat Gelsinger, then CTO of Intel, shocked everyone with his power graphs, the design world has been more concerned about power than almost anything else. Pat pointed out that if we kept increasing clock rates then the power density of an Intel...

On Saturday I attended the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association (CASPA) annual conference and dinner. You might have noticed that I am not Chinese 可是我会说中文，虽然我不是流利。I seem to have been a sort of honorary member since I moderated a panel...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Moshik Rubin takes a closer look at the latest trends for the MIPI protocol standard.

https://youtu.be/Zg-1nNU6yr0

On the third Thursday of each month the IEEE Computer Society of Silicon Valley has a meeting. Very conveniently for me, it is held in the building 10 auditorium on the Cadence campus. This month's presentation was by Professor Fred Barez of San Jose...

Between about 2000 and 2010, there were a number of startup companies that attempted to commercialize the idea of virtual platforms: Axys Design Automation, Virtio, VaST Systems Technology, Virtutech, CoWare, Imperas, Carbon Design Systems. In some strange...

ARM Acquires Carbon

ARM announced that it had acquired Carbon Design Systems. They were one of the remaining independent virtual platform companies. They started focused on accelerating RTL models by throwing away detail, resulting in much faster C...

Next Thursday, October 29, 2015, the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) is organizing an evening on patents and patent litigation. This is partially due to the US Patent and Trademark Office opening a Silicon Valley office in San Jose. This...

Release Highlights July 2015
Some nice enhancements to the COS experience. Ability to set preferred release for searching, better interface for navigating search results in product manuals.

Using Case Groups: User Roles and Sub-Group
This video shows the functionality provided by Cadence Online Support to share viewing and administering of Cases

Virtuoso Analog Design Environment…