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OK, OK - I'm sure you don't "need" SPB16.3 to see all the cool whiz-bang features in Windows 7. But, you can now run the SPB16.3 (and very soon the ADW16.3) release on Windows 7.

You can always visit the Cadence Online Support Cadence Support News area for the latest information about releases, platforms, CDNLive information, etc. The official Windows 7 announcement for the SPB16.3 release can be found…

In my last post I wrote some packet generation code to validate the claim that e code can be up to 3 times more compact vs. the equivalent functionality in SystemVerilog.  The result was actually an e description that was more than 3x less than the SystemVerilog equivalent.  In this post, let’s see if these lopsided ratios carry forward to coverage as well.

If a user wanted to add coverage to the generation example…

I was recently asked by an engineering manager if running IR drop analysis was really necessary. The argument to support his question was that his engineering team always over-designs the power rails, and so the risk of getting high IR drop was so small that analysis was not required.

The easiest way to answer his question was to relate what actually happened during the creation of a DAC demo a number of years…

Just a quick post to let you know that there have recently been a whole truckload of videos added to the Cadence Online Support Video Library.  (Some shameless self-promotion here--I created many of them...).  Simply go to https://support.cadence.com/ (registration required) and choose Resources->Video Library.  You may want to set up your product preferences to only view those product areas you're interested in. 

I usually discuss our SPB solution technical capabilities in my weekly blogs, but decided to chat about this week's press announcement - "Cadence Teams with AcAe to Accelerate Customer Transitions to Allegro PCB Products" - and ask what works the best for you when you've engaged with a design services company.

Of course, Cadence offers services to help our customers enhance their design environments,…

I still remember my first encounter with OCEAN. It was 2002 and my co-worker had asked me to run a simple test for him.  I sat in my cube, ruffling through our user guides, trying to quickly learn just enough to do the task at hand.  The story ended happily,  but I sure would have saved some time and frustration had I seen the following video.  So for you OCEAN neophytes out there, here’s a nutshell video to get you out of…

You've probably read about all the buzz in the EDA news this week -

"Cadence acquires FPGA-focused EDA startup" and here.

"Cadence buys Taray in time for 28nm FPGAs"

"Cadence Acquires FPGA Tool Firm Taray"

"Cadence acquires Taray (why did it take them so long?)"


Of course, the Taray "7 Circuits" FPGA optimization technology had been integrated into the Cadence OrCAD and…

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that I was able to keep up with a lot of the discussion going on at a recent Accellera TSC meeting just by reading the tweets from the participants. That experience got me thinking about how much social media has changed the nature of such meetings, and the consequences of these changes. Clearly, public tweeting from confidential meetings related to your job is crazy and an invitation…

In an earlier post Team Specman had the pleasure of introducing the free, open source software (FOSS) "CFS Vision" project.  The CFS Vision team has now posted this brief introductory video on the Java-based eVC Generator utility described in our interview with their leader, Cristian Slav:

Enjoy the video, and this free utility!

Team Specman

P.S. Do you have…

Allegro PCB SI has supported multiple simulation engines for well over seven years.  Other than the native TLsim engine, HSpice has been one of the more popular simulation engine choices.  This year at SNUG, we have been invited to meet with HSpice users and show them the value of running HSpice directly from the Cadence Allegro PCB SI environment.

This demonstration shows HSpice running with IBIS models, and compares the…

Many of our customers use our Virtuoso software in combination with the windows emulation product from OpenText named "Exceed on Demand".   To maximize performance between the two tools, we have some recommendations: 

For IC6.1.4 and Exceed on Demand 7, these setting will cause problems between the two programs.  You should change the settings to the following:

Steve Lewis

This week, I'm taking a brief break from the usual PCB solution/product technical discussions and focusing on a very interesting capability used with the Cadence Allegro PCB Editor product.

You can read all the details from this article - Integrated Optical & Electronic Interconnect PCB Manufacturing in a recent PCB007 update.

 Most of you know that my primary focus is the "front end" environment for the Cadence…

[Team Specman welcomes back guest blogger, Michael Avery from our Services Group in the UK]

Building on the Part 1 introduction to Specman’s messaging built-in infrastructure, allow me to share some tips on how to programmatically control and scale message display to help shorten your debug time.

First and foremost: please, please, please avoid manually commenting out/in debug messages.  While it’s very tempting to…

Since I'm not a member of the Accellera VIP TSC, I did not attend the 2.5-day face-to-face meeting held last week in Massachusetts. But with the steady stream of tweets coming from several of those who did attend, I almost felt as if I were there. That experience will be subject of my next blog entry, but for today I want to touch on some of the interesting news from the face-to-face. Perhaps the most exciting was that…

[Team Specman welcomes guest blogger Michael Avery, from our Services Group in the UK]

Messaging is important for two main reasons:

• It is essential for debugging

• It can greatly impact simulation performance

This is why Specman has a messaging infrastructure built-in to provide an easy to use, scalable and efficient mechanism.  Furthermore, Specman’s messaging capabilities allow you to do almost anything which you can conceive…

You'll need to check into the nifty new probe capabilities in the SPB16.3 Allegro AMS Simulator release

These enhancements will improve your experience with analyzing simulation results especially for dense designs.

 These features include:

• Easy to use pop-up menu for traces
• Access to Trace Property and Hide and Show Traces
• Customizing auto-rotation of trace color from an enhanced color set
• Controlling background and foreground…

Digital designs are reaching 10's of millions of instances, which makes efficiency of the overall digital implementation and signoff flow critical to ensure predictability in the design schedule.   A major stumbling block that can be a real threat to that predictability is iterations between different stages of the design flow. There are multiple reasons why this happens but one that should not happen is because…