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Recently the RISC-V Fifth Workshop took place at Google in Mountain View. As always, there were lots of presentations from academics. RISC-V has been a big hit there as the only instruction set architecture that is feasible for use in teaching and research...

Last week, Lip-Bu Tan, the CEO of Cadence, received the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award from GSA. Before getting to the award, let me say a few words about who GSA are, and who Morris Chang is, in case you are not familiar with them.

Morris...

BarCamp was inspired by an invitation-only participant-driven conference, named Foo Camp. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, in 2005. Since then it has become an international trend when it comes to workshop events. According to the...

At IEDM last week, there were papers in eight parallel tracks for three days. At the end of session #2, on the first day, there were two "late" papers by TSMC and by the consortium of IBM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, and Samsung talking about 7nm.

Interface Element (IE) Setup can be one of the most challenging parts in AMS Designer. If you use the traditional Connect Rule/Connect Modue Based Setup, it requires you to juggle between multiple windows to compose the setup flow.  However, with this new Interface Element/IE-card Based Setup, you can configure your connect rules and connect modules, specify the scope for the built-in IE cards, and set values of important…

It's a new year soon. And that means New Year Resolutions. I will go to the gym...and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

You might have seen something about the Microsoft Hololens, which was announced at Hot Chips...

I have been working with computers for a long time. I first learned to program in the late 1960s, when a computer was a mainframe in a special room with its priesthood of operators, a long way from the PC, never mind smartphones. Since I was often the...

https://youtu.be/wtOOIg32ma8

Monday: Lip-Bu Tan is honored by GSA with the Maurice Chang Exemplary Leadership Award

Tuesday: IEDM, the International Electronic Devices Meeting. I'll cover some of the advanced process announcements.

Wednesday...

The Sunday of IEDM there were two all-day short courses. The one I attended was Technology Options for the 5nm Node. It was organized by An Steegen of imec. I am not going to attempt to cover the entire day's presentations in a short post like this, but...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, the last of a 3-part series, Lana Chan discusses the evolution of PCI Express and the changes associated with PCIe Gen 4.

https://youtu.be/fHaAyK1OMls

You must have come across and experienced the capabilities of Pin to Trunk routing and its robust features. The Pin to Trunk routing connects an individual pin to a trunk. This routing style is usually used when a spine structure is required.

With complex and large designs, there are large array of pin connections. At times, while routing we encounter issues with the array of pin connection. Have you ever thought:…

We all know the futuristic vision of the world just around the corner. The vision where we tell our smart home that we’ve just left work at the end of a long day, and we’re heading home. Our home then tells the thermostat to warm up or cool down, lights to turn on, and the oven to start baking the lasagna we left in it that morning. We arrive to a warm, brightly lit home, and hot, freshly cooked food.

You…

I wrote recently about Eben Upton's presentation about the genesis of business-card-sized Raspberry Pi, and how they went from optimistically hoping to sell 10,000 to surpassing 10 million three months ago. If you don't know what Raspberry Pi is, then...

One of the announcements at the recent RISC-V workshop was by SiFive. This is the company started by the creators of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (Krste, Andrew, and Yunsup) to commercialize silicon implementations.

Four months ago, at the...

We'd like to welcome guest writer Yanyan Qiao from our Cadence Japan AE team.  Many thanks for her contribution!

Today analog design has become very challenging. Analog circuit designers need tools which can provide deep insight into circuit behavior. The MMSIM simulator family provides device check functions, as well as static circuit topology checks and dynamic behavior check functions for typical design problem…

The fifth (V^th?) RISC-V workshop took place this week at Google in Mountain View. This was actually the third workshop this year. Rick O'Connor, the executive director of the RISC-V foundation, opened the meeting. "It's been quite a year," he said, giving...

https://youtu.be/IAPCDXodsno

Monday: James Adams of the Raspberry Pi foundation talks about how Cadence PCB tools were used to design the Raspberry Pi

Tuesday: At the recent RISC-V workshop, SiFive announced the first commercially available RISC-V ...

At EDPS back in May (yes, I know I'm behind), Andrew Filo talked about Building the Internet of Space (IOS). He is an independent consultant but works with places like NASA Ames and was a consultant on the 3D printer in the ISS. What he was really...

Some things are best described with tables—each column shows the values for one category, and each row encapsulates one given set of values for all categories. e verification language code is a perfect fit.

This blog describes how to use tables in your verification environment code to make the code more readable and more easily maintained. The tables can be written in the code or they can be pulled in from an external…

I attended a recent workshop on Protium titled Accelerating Embedded Software Development: Protium—Ease of Use in FPGA-Based Prototyping. By the way, Protium really is a word, used in chemistry and physics when they need to specify the isotope of...

Tired of struggling with pairing your Bluetooth devices and getting them to work with each other? In this week’s Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Scott Jacobson explains how Bluetooth 5 does away with this and other range limitation problems and makes connecting your mobile devices seamless.

https://youtu.be/qEA9OYRifWo

There is an Accellera working group that is developing a portable stimulus standard. Like any Accellera group, it contains vendors and users so that both communities are represented.The working group is chaired by Faris Khundakjie of Intel, the vice-chair...

Soon it is the International Electron Devices Meeting. It takes place in San Francisco Hilton Union Square (which is actually not in Union Square but on O'Farrell Street a couple of blocks away). It is from December 3rd to 7th. So it starts next weekend...