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In the SPB16.01 release, for the Constraint Manager in DEHDL, the is a new scope of "Class" for Match Groups.

This new scope will utilize the “Net Class” signal grouping introduced in 16.0, and allow users to mimic the capability of Bus Scope with this new arbitrary grouping. It will operate as Bus Scope does today, i.e. it is limited to ECSets, and is only used during the ECSet mapping process, creating distinct…

This year, Cadence increases its focus on system-level design and verification events. During the latest CDNLive San-Jose that was held in September, the guest keynote - Dr. Jan Rabaey, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, described the challenges and opportunities facing customers and partners in the years ahead.

System-level design was the center of his talk. According…

Several years ago, I have purchased a cell phone with a 2 years contract from one of the major wireless service providers in the US. The battery lifetime between charges of this phone was terrible - 24 hours. The service provider promised me that there will be a firmware upgrade which will improve the battery charge time. 9 months later, I uploaded new firmware which allowed me to double the time between charges. These kind…

Global Timing Debug has been a very popular capability within SoC-Encounter.  Once you start using it, it becomes hard to go back to looking at text reports.  The high level philosophy of Global Timing Debug is to assess not just the worst path in the design- but all of the failing paths to get a feel for the categories of problems which are blocking timing closure.

That said, I find that Global Timing Debug visualizes a…

There is a definite challenge in maintaining productivity when it comes to realizing a design.  Anything that helps the layout with increasing productivity does it for me.  All the marketing and management buzz words apply here; design complexity with shrinking time to market.

For layout designers in the custom and analog/mixed signal arena, who have increasing productivity demands, Virtuoso IC 6.1.3 and the Virtuoso Layout…

Formal verification can mean different things depending upon who you speak to. If I were blogging under Logic Design, it would probably indicate a series of loosely correlated opinions and observations on the topic of equivalency checking. However, this happens to be the Functional Verification forum and this blog about model-checking.

Model-checking: The process of checking whether a given structure is a model of a given…

You may recall a post I made a couple months ago about What's Good About Differential Pair Support in ASA?

In order to establish Differential Pair support for Design Entry HDL (DEHDL), the SPB16.01 release included enhancements to PCB Librarian which allow designers to define diff pair pins.

With the increased signal speeds of complex designs, differential pair signals are becoming more and more prevalent. In order to…

For those of you that attended CDNLive! but may have missed the presentation on multi-gigabit package design by Kevin Roselle of Bayside Design, you can review the slide presentation by using your conference login and then downloading from here.  Bayside is involved in designing many high-end packages and it was a real eye opener to hear about the trials Kevin and his team have been through as they design and debug these…

As promised, here are some photos last week events, with embedded color commentary. NOTE: there are two additional events next week that will be featuring none other than fellow blogger and Cadence Distinguished Engineer Mike Stellfox:

• Kista, Sweden on Monday October 6
• Bristol, UK on Wednesday October 8

Related note for Silicon Valley California residents: Please save the date of Tuesday, October 28 for a Metric-Driven Verification…

At the recently completed CDNLive! Silicon Valley 2008 user conference, I had a chance to catch a fantastic presentation on the subject of database access within SoC-Encounter by Jason Gentry from Avago Technologies.  If you'll recall, my very first blog entry in this space was on this exact topic, so I was very interested in attending his session.

Here is an interview I did with Jason at the conference summarizing…

This year I did not attend CDNLive! in San Jose. I wasn't presenting anything and was quite busy with other things. The good news was that there were three ISX (Incisive Software Extensions) users making the presentations so I could stay home and keep working on the new stuff for the upcoming 8.2 release.

Two years ago at CDNLive! 2006, I presented ISX for the first time to the Cadence Verification Community. The p…

Recognize the name Charles Caleb Colton? No? He was a British writer who in 1820 coined the phrase, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." His words could not ring more true today. With some amusement, I watched the unveiling of a "new and revolutionary" custom design product on Monday, September 22.

As I watched, I could not help to see that it had an umistakable familiarity (which was also…

I'm sure many of you will have read the article in Advanced Packaging click_here where the luminaries at Georgia-Tech talk about how TSV can take us to the next level of functional integration and miniaturization.  I have heard several companies (foundries and some iDM's) talking about pilot projects in this area, but will it really become prolific?  Are the days of die stacks using wirebonding numbered?

My belief…

Hey Folks, thanks to all of you who participated in CDNLive SV. There was a lot of great information shared by our customers as to their success using teh latest Virtuoso (which by the way has a new version IC6.1.3 out on downloads). 

Three presentations that I would call your attention to come from our customers Freescale, Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics. Each found new and interesting ways of using the advanced…

Wow - what a great time I had attending this year's CDNLive! 2008 event in San Jose. You can read the details in my prior posts from last week, but I'll provide a brief re-cap here:

• By far, the most valuable aspect of attending CDNLive! is networking with customers and Cadence people. I heard this from all customers I spoke with and personally agree. Meeting the many customers I've worked with as an Application…

Although Spectre Turbo was released back in April, I hadn't found time to fully tinker with it. As I explored the idea of highlighting it on the community site, I tested it on at least 6 different designs, from VCOs to PLLs, testing both pre and post-layout, and Spectre Turbo chewed right through my sims. It not only drastically shortened my sim times but also maintained spice accuracy and that’s why I absolutely wanted…

In one of my previous posts I introduced an interesting book titled Dreaming in Code. One of the great quotes from the book pertains to today's subject, embedded software debugging. If you don't have the book you can look it up on the book excerpt page of the author's website for the book.

If you talk with programmers about this, prepare for whiplash. On the one hand, you may hear that things have never looked…

With all of the momentum around the OVM these days there has been a lot of good discussion about testbench methodology. The OVM provides a great methodology framework for building modular, reusable verification environments, but there is more needed to get the full value of adopting an HVL like SystemVerilog or e.

I have seen a lot of people adopt an HVL and continue doing directed testing -- that leads to a whole lot…

I just finished the week at Cadence's CDNLive User Group in San Jose. Over the past few years, it has really become a great technical event for the verification community. In fact, last year out of all the papers presented across the full breadth of Cadence tools and methodologies, Kelly Larson from Analog Devices won the Most Valuable Paper Award for his presentation which explained the benefits of migrating from VMM…

My colleague Joe Hupcey has been keeping you informed and entertained with information and photos from this week's CDNLive! Silicon Valley event in San Jose. I've attended a fair number of talks and other activities at the show and I have to say that I found it very enjoyable.

One of my most fundamental job-related beliefs is that you always learn something anytime you talk to any customer about anything. An event…