Community

Via transitions are very common for signals. And in high speed frequencies, these via transitions can be a major contributor to signal degradation in PCB interconnects. High speed channels require ground via(s) close to critical signals to reduce loss of signal integrity by providing continuous return current path when signals transition layers.

If you are a PCB design engineer, you know very well that layout implementation…

The 5th RISC-V workshop is coming up on November 29 and 30 on the Google Quad campus (468 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA). RISC-V is pronounced "risk five", so perhaps we should just call it the Vth workshop. The preliminary schedule has now been published...

https://youtu.be/dHvlzjjH9SA

Monday: The Academic Panel: the Academics Go First

Tuesday: The Academic Panel: the Cadence execs respond

Wednesday: Audience Q&A

Thursday: You'll have to look to find out...oh, and Happy Thanksgiving

Friday...

At the largest gathering of formal verification (FV) engineers in the world, also known as the Jasper User Group, Ziyad Hanna gave the final presentation. Since this was on future developments in the Jasper product line, and since he is the VP of R&D...

After ARM on the first day, the keynote on the second day of DVCon was by NXP. For semiconductor, automotive is still much smaller than mobile, but it is growing fast. It is growing not so much because of inherent growth in the underlying market for cars...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Moshik Rubin takes a closer look at the popularity of CSI2, DSI, and other common MIPI protocols.

www.youtube.com/watch

The first ARM is the ARM we all know, Advanced RISC Machines (the A originally stood for Acorn but that story is for another day). The second ARM stands for "Architecture Reference Manual". At the Jasper User Group recently, Daryl Stewart of ARM's technology...

Jon Masters is in an odd position—he is the chief ARM architect at Red Hat. Since Red Hat must make almost all of its money from selling operating systems and services for x86-based servers, this is definitely a minority interest position. However, he...

Improve Route Channel Utilization with Tabbed Routing

Tabbed routing is a new method in which trapezoidal shapes called tabs are added to parallel traces to control impedance in the pin field/breakout regions, and reduce crosstalk in open field regions. It is a breakthrough routing strategy that allows for longer trace lengths and more compressed routing.

Unfortunately, this new routing technology increases layout…

At TSMC's OIP Ecosystem Symposium, Cadence's Frank Schirrmeister presented on Software-Driven Optimization for Performance, Power, and Thermal Tradeoffs. In this case, the "software" doesn't mean Cadence EDA tools but rather using the target software...

ISO 26262 is the functional safety standard for automotive, as you probably already know. It is hard to attend any event concerned with semiconductors without hearing about automotive. The automotive market has been memorably described as a pot of gold...

https://youtu.be/OQ1c30nbD0s

Monday: Red Hat's Jon Masters talks about ARM servers and open source

Tuesday: ARM's Daryl Stewart talks about making the ARM architecture reference manual machine-readable

Wednesday: Jürgen Wyer of NXP started...

The second keynote on the first day of ARM TechCon was a double act with Greg Yeric, a fellow from ARM's research labs in Austin, followed by Mike Muller, ARM's CTO.

I have seen Greg talk before, and he seems always to have the...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, the first in a three part series focusing on Functional Safety for autonomous driving, Charles Qi discusses the industry trends and requirements for self-driving vehicles.

Who wrote the book on formal verification? Depending on whether you want to take the question literally or metaphorically, the answer is either Intel's Erik Seligman or Cadence's Jasper product group.

As usual, Oz got things rolling...

Are you contemplating manipulating your layout hierarchy by adding or removing a few levels? Are you wondering if having a layout hierarchy out of sync with the schematic is advisable? Well, neither I (nor Cadence) will recommend that you play around...

Eben Upton gave a spellbinding keynote at ARM TechCon on the history of Raspberry Pi. He is a founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation and also an ASIC designer at Broadcom. Unusually for a keynote like that, he had no powerpoint. He just stood on stage...

Charlie Miller gave a keynote at ARM TechCon on automotive security. He is regarded as one of the world's most proficient hacker, although he is one of the good guys (a white hat in security parlance). He has a PhD, worked for the NSA, and is currently...

https://youtu.be/n4jz8shM1hM

Monday: The amazing story of Raspberry Pi as told by Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation

Tuesday: The Jasper User Group is the largest gathering of formal verification engineers each year. See what is...

One of the big themes of pretty much any conference on semiconductors these days is automotive, and DVCon Europe was no exception. For me the most memorable phrase of the day was from Amir Rahat of Optima, that automotive semiconductors are "a pot of...

Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is a key kernel in almost all DSP applications, and an important benchmark for assessing the efficiency of a DSP.  In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Pushkar Patwardhan discusses how efficient FFTs are on the Tensilica ConnX BBE32EP, a DSP targeted for complex number processing in wireless baseband and radar applications.

https://youtu.be/IDg4u_qux44

Learn more about Tensilica…

Do you remember what life was like before the internet and smart phones? If you wanted to find information about something, you had to go to the library and find a book that could answer your question, which usually meant a delay of anything from a few hours to several days. Then the internet happened, and the world as we know it changed forever. Smart phones came along, and brought with them a new kind of freedom and…