Community

Blogs
Forums
Resources

Latest Forum Posts

Visit the User Forums »

Latest Blog Posts

Breakfast Bytes: SEMICON China: Is This China's Decade?

Paul McLellan

One of the presentations on the opening day of SEMICON China, here in Shanghai, was by Rick Wallace, who is the CEO of KLA-Tencor (KT). He started by pointing out that KT have been selling for the entire history of the industry, so he thought it woul...
- 20 Mar 2018
Verification: App Note Spotlight: Streamline Your SystemVerilog Code, Part I

XTeam

Welcome to a special multi-part edition of the App Note Spotlight, where we’ll be highlighting an interesting app note that you may have overlooked—Simulation Performance Coding Guidelines for SystemVerliog. This app note overviews all sorts of coding guidelines and helpful tips to help optimize your SystemVerilog code’s performance. These strategies aren’t specific to just the Xcelium Parallel Simulator—in…
- 19 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: CDNLive, the New Season

Paul McLellan

It's nearly April and so it is the start of the CDNLive season. This year there are seven conferences, starting with Silicon Valley. The dates are: Silicon Valley (in the Santa Clara Convention Center), April 10 - 11 Munich, Germany (in the...
- 19 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: SEMICON China: Me and 70,000 of My Closest Friends

Paul McLellan

If you want to know why I made the trek from California to Shanghai to attend SEMICON China, it is well summed up in the press release that SEMI put out on opening day: SEMICON China 2018 opens today at SNIEC in Shanghai with a record 70,000 visitor...
- 16 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: Semiconductor Rankings: Thanks for the Memory

Paul McLellan

I wrote recently about how Samsung's extraordinary 50+% year-on-year growth took them to #1. I also cautioned that a lot seemed to be due to strong prices in memory, DRAM in particular. I was reminded of this when I came across an IC Insights rep...
- 15 Mar 2018
The India Circuit: Shopping in Reality: How VR and AR Are Changing The Way We Shop

Madhavi Rao

Like millions of Indians, I shop a lot online, whether for groceries, shoes or even electronics. I buy most of my clothes online, but here I have hit a snag, and that is in sizing. I seem to be in a constant cycle of ordering clothes online and retur...
- 14 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: China Bike Rental

Paul McLellan

In the last couple of years, one of the biggest changes in China has been the arrival of bike sharing everywhere. At one level, you can think of it as Uber for bicycles: there's a smartphone app, you get a bike, you use it, you get charged throug...
- 14 Mar 2018
Analog/Custom Design: Virtuosity: Signal Browsing Gets Easier with Advanced Search Options

Ashu V

Imagine what would happen if we were living in the world with no search engines. Wouldn’t we find ourselves lost in the deep information ocean, struggling to find the relevant stuff? The situation would be chaotic and nothing short of a nightmare. Cutting-edge search technology has given us unprecedented access to information at the click of a button—something that our previous generations could only dream of. Web search…
- 14 Mar 2018
Whiteboard Wednesdays: Whiteboard Wednesdays - The 3 Methods of Memory Controller Port Arbitration

References4U

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Jing Liu describes three methods of port arbitration in memory controller designs: round-robin, priority round-robin, and weighted round-robin.

https://youtu.be/CR6dQcoz868
- 13 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: What's For Breakfast? Video Preview March 19th to 23rd 2018

Paul McLellan

https://youtu.be/2-ErrC9yy2k Coming from SEMICON China, Shanghai (camera Tracy Zhu) Monday: CDNLive Silicon Valley Preview Tuesday: SEMICON China II Wednesday: "Lick" Licklider, Unsung Hero of US Computer Science Thursday: ...
- 13 Mar 2018
Verification: Preparing Accellera Portable Stimulus Standard for Ratification

Steve Brown

The Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group met at the DVCon 2018 to move the process forward towards ratification. While we can't predict exactly when it will be ratified, the goal is now more clearly in sight! Cadence booth was busy with a lo...
- 13 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: The Great Firewall of China

Paul McLellan

This is a continuation of yesterday's post on Walled Gardens. Arguably the greatest walled garden of them all is China. It even has a wall! A great one. The Great Firewall of China China is not a democracy, of course, so the elite who contr...
- 13 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: Walled Gardens

Paul McLellan

I'm in China this week, for SEMICON China, along with 70,000 of my closest friends. That's three times the size of SEMICON West, if anyone is counting. So I'm going to be writing about China all week. This post starts off...not Chinese a...
- 12 Mar 2018
Verification: Temporals, Reset, and Test Phases

teamspecman

One of the biggest challenges in dynamic functional verification is testing Reset – resetting the DUT during simulation and check DUT operation afterwards. The main challenges are propagating the reset information in the testbench, and adjusting the components behavior.

For performance and accuracy, it is best to have one agent controlling and monitoring the reset, rather than each and every agent monitoring the…
- 11 Mar 2018
System, PCB, & Package Design : Thermal Analysis of Package/PCB Systems: Challenges and Solutions

Sigrity

More and more package/PCB system designs are requiring thermal analysis. Power dissipation is a critical issue in package/PCB systems design which requires careful consideration of the thermal and electrical domains. To better understand therma...
- 9 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: Spanish Flu Is 100 Years Old on Sunday

Paul McLellan

This Sunday, March 11, is the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918, when patient zero was diagnosed. Anniversary usually implies something good, but Spanish flu was anything but. Albert Gitchell, an Army cook at Fort Riley, K...
- 9 Mar 2018
Analog/Custom Design: Virtuosity: Exploring Histories

Arja H

OK we heard you, you want to be able to specify Virtuoso ADE Explorer history names before simulation and you want these histories to increment just like they do in Virtuoso ADE Assembler, right? Let's look at how to do this.
- 8 Mar 2018
Analog/Custom Design: Virtuosity: Do I Need To Run a Simulation To Plot From a Text File?

Arja H

You'll be glad to hear the answer is No! In Virtuoso Visualization and Analysis, we have a Calculator function available called getAsciiWave, which will create a plot from your text file without the need to create a schematic or a testbench, or run simulation. Let's see how easy it is with the help of an example.
- 8 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: embedded world: Mark Papermaster of AMD

Paul McLellan

The opening keynote from embedded world in Nuremberg was by Mark Papermaster, who is the CTO of AMD. The second-day keynote was by Andrea Martin, who is CTO for that part of IBM. The first thing to point out is that AMD and IBM are not the first comp...
- 8 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: 3nm Cadence and imec

Paul McLellan

I started Breakfast Bytes on October 8, 2015, my first day back at Cadence. The very first (real) post was Cadence and imec Announce World's First 5nm Tapeout. I had to find out what I could about the test-chip, write it up, and publish, a...
- 7 Mar 2018
Whiteboard Wednesdays: Whiteboard Wednesdays - Error Correction Code Implementations in Memory Controller Designs

References4U

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Jing Liu provides a simple explanation of the in-line and out-of-band methods of Error Correction Code (ECC) implementation in memory subsystem designs.

https://youtu.be/ejYImUgMXTI
- 6 Mar 2018
Verification: App Note Spotlight: Choosing the Incremental Elaboration Flow That’s Right For You

XTeam

Welcome to another App Note Spotlight!

One of the biggest issues facing verification engineers is the question of reducing elaboration time. Using incremental elaboration (MSIE) can greatly reduce that time—but that raises a new question: between the two MSIE flows, which one is right for you?

Those two MSIE flows are single-xrun MSIE, and multi-xrun/xmelab MSIE. Single-xrun (1-xrun) MSIE is the simplest; all you…
- 6 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: Spectre with a Red Hat, part 2

Paul McLellan

This is the second post about Red Hat's John Masters presentation at FOSDEM 2018 presentation Exploiting Modern Microarchitectures: Meltdown, Spectre, and Other Attacks. The first part appeared in Breakfast Bytes yesterday. Todays' post covers S...
- 6 Mar 2018
Breakfast Bytes: Spectre with a Red Hat

Paul McLellan

A couple of weekends ago it was FOSDEM 2018, the largest conference on open source in Europe. It was held in Brussels. In keeping with the open source ethos, it was free, anyone could go, there was no registration, and all of the dozen or more parall...
- 5 Mar 2018
The India Circuit: Incubators, Accelerators and Fabless Chip Design at IESA Vision Summit 2018

Madhavi Rao

This week we had one of the Indian semiconductor industry’s biggest and most well-attended conferences, the Indian Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) Vision Summit, in Bangalore. This event is now in its 13th year and attracts the...
- 1 Mar 2018

Cadence Guidelines

Community Guidelines

The Cadence Design Communities support Cadence users and technologists interacting to exchange ideas, news, technical information, and best practices to solve problems and get the most from Cadence technology. The community is open to everyone, and to provide the most value, we require participants to follow our Community Guidelines that facilitate a quality exchange of ideas and information. By accessing, contributing, using or downloading any materials from the site, you agree to be bound by the full Community Guidelines.