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Scott Barric of MicroSemi is one of the people who have been using the pre-release version of Pegasus, the new physical verification solution that Cadence announced at CDNLive Silicon Valley. See Pegasus Flies to the Clouds for more details.

Microsemi...

So you have your RTL written, and it’s time to optimize to reduce power. If that’s your plan, you are likely leaving power on the table. It’s not that you can’t get a lot of savings with existing RTL synthesis tools (you certainly can!), but the biggest bang for the buck comes from early design decisions.

Next time… start sooner!

In fact, experts (not me, real experts) estimate that optimal…

It’s been quite a while since I wrote about “Things I Learned by Browsing Cadence Online Support”.  That absolutely does not mean that I haven’t learned anything recently by browsing Cadence Online Support.  It just means I haven’t had time to write about it!

So now it’s time to expand and re-purpose the “Virtuosity” brand.  From now on, the blogs under that heading will…

I pointed out recently that although La La Land is a romance, the movie opens with cars. The semiconductor industry is like that, too—no matter which way you turn it is automotive. It may not show yet in manufacturing volume and revenue, since it is...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Tom Hackett traces the evolution of the von Neumann computer architecture through a series of adaptations intended to bypass processing bottlenecks that appeared as more and more demands were placed on computing systems.  This provides a historical lens with which to view the recent development of the CCIX interconnect standard.

www.youtube.com/watch

First, some sad news. Bob Gardner, for many years the executive director of the ESD Alliance (although then called EDAC) passed away on April 11. I didn't know him that well, mostly as the guy running EDAC and as one of the members of the band of EDA...

Traditionally at CDNLive Silicon Valley, the first keynote is given by Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence's CEO. Then an external presenter speaks, usually a customer. And then we announce something new. This year, the something new was Pegasus, the new highly parallel...

Confused by those names? The conference is the International Reliability and Physics Symposium, IRPS. The panel is on IRDS, the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems, which is the new incarnation of ITRS (the International Technology Roadmap for...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Megha Daga takes a closer look at the compute requirements and memory bandwidth challenges that are faced in Convolutional Neural Networks today.

https://youtu.be/UPhHr5_Xx4A

The Sunday and Monday at IRPS are tutorial days, with multiple tracks. On Monday I attended the automotive track. IRPS has historically been very focused on device reliability, things like device aging and single-event-effects. However, automotive is...

https://youtu.be/n1uLybW0__s

Coming from Millennium Park, Chicago (camera Jessamine McLellan)

Monday: Embedded Vision Summit announcement

Tuesday: Microsemi Experience with Pegasus DRC

Wednesday: Preview of CDNLive Munich

Thursday: UVM Just Became...

Roger Thornton of the Raspberry Pi foundation talked about designing their latest computer, the Raspberry Pi Zero W, which is a tiny single-board computer even smaller than the original Raspberry Pi but it also has WiFi and Bluetooth...and instead of...

System Design Enablement (SDE) is about designing optimal systems, focusing effort on areas that make a difference to the end customer. If you are reading this, then you already know that Cadence sells EDA software for digital design, for analog design...

Cache coherency has become a big issue as the architecture inside devices such as smartphones and datacenter CPUs has got more complicated. In the old days...which sounds like the start of fairy tale...there was a single processor and the memory hierarchy...

Today is an important anniversary. It is part of the explanation of why we design chips in silicon valley but manufacture them in Taiwan. Or why, on the back of every iPhone, it says "Designed by Apple in California, manufactured in China."...

Did you check out the new Pnoise and Hbnoise Choosing Analyses forms in the MMSIM 15.1 and IC6.1.7 /ICADV12.2 releases? These forms have been significantly improved and simplified. The Direct Plot Form has also been enhanced and is much easy to use. Let...

https://youtu.be/OttUOjIHJf0

Coming from the Cadence coffee bar (camera Sean)

Monday: The $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W

Tuesday: The Safest Train Is One That Never Leaves the Station

Wednesday: The IRDS Panel at IRPS

Thursday: Microsoft Keynote at CDNLive...

Cars are everywhere these days. It doesn't really matter what sort of event you attend in the semiconductor ecosystem, you will hear a lot about cars. In fact, even if you go to the movies. The best-picture-Oscar-for-two-minutes winner La La Land

We live on a radioactive planet bombarded by cosmic rays. As a result, high-energy neutrons are a fact of life. This can lead to errors caused by single-event effects, or usually just SEE. SEE cause unpredictable system behavior and threaten safety and...

Every aspiring 7-year old detective knows that fingerprints are unique. I actually spent six months a few years ago working with a security company, Biogy, which had a biometric USB thumb drive that required a fingerprint to unlock it. I bet you didn...

If you listen to presentations about high-speed networking for datacenters, you will hear a lot about retimers and gearboxes. With optical networks, one challenge is how you get from the optical domain to the electrical domain. After all, you can't just...

Paolo Gargini gave the opening keynote at GOMAC recently. It was titled The Secret of Success: Roadmap, Research, Prototyping, and Manufacturing.

He has been involved in the direction of semiconductor technology for several decades. He has had two hats...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Tom Hackett explains why the USB Type-C interface took longer than expected to show up in consumer electronics.  He breaks down the 5 reasons for the delay and why they also apply to the adoption of all new standards.

https://youtu.be/Qrw0Fsd0cCs