The automotive segment is being well served by semiconductor suppliers of all sizes because of the unit volumes, and the constant push to automate more of the driving decisions to silicon and software can raise lots of questions about safety, reliability and trust. Fortunately the ISO standards body has already put in place a functional safety compliance specification ...

As an IC designer I absolutely loved embarking on a new design project, starting with a fresh, blank slate, not having to use any legacy blocks. In the early 1980's we really hadn't given much thought to re-using semiconductor IP because each new project typically came with a new process node, so there was no IP even ready for re-use, at least not at the IDM that I worked at. In 2018 by stark contrast we now have a thriving IP economy providing IC designers with everything starting from simple logic functions at the low-end, ...

Reliability of ICs isn't a new thing, because back in 1980 I was investigating why a DRAM chip using 6um technology was having yield loss due to electromigration effects. I recall looking through a microscope at a DRAM layout and slowly ramping up the Vdd level then suddenly the shiny aluminum interconnect started to change colors and actually bubble because of the high currents, then the metal evaporated. We never could identify ...

I just had to drive my car 7 miles from Tualatin, Oregon to visit with an EDA veteran who has played a lot of diverse roles in his career, including: IC Mask Designer, Layout Manager, Account Manager, Business Development, Director, Foundry Relations Director. His name is John Stabenow, with Mentor, a Siemens Business, and we met in Wilsonville, Oregon last month to talk about Tanner EDA. I've known John for awhile and he's worked with all three major EDA vendors over the years, so has a really deep perspective especially on the IC side. ...

I use Quicken to manage my business and personal finances because it saves me so much time by downloading all of my transactions from Chase for credit card, Amazon for credit card, Wells Fargo for banking and Schwab for IRA. Likewise, for IP management in SoC design you want an app like Quicken that plays well with other tools that you are already familiar with. Such is the case with IP management as many engineers have used Git before to manage ...

Transistor-level design for full-custom and analog circuits has long been a way for IC design companies to get the absolute best performance out of silicon and keep ahead of the competition. One challenge to circuit designers is meeting all of the specs across all Process, Voltage and Temperature (PVT) corners, so that silicon yields high enough to maximize profits. In the early days of my IC design career at Intel in the 1970's we had a simple design methodology:
...

Synopsys is pretty well-known for their early entry into logic synthesis with the Design Compiler tool and more recent P&R tool with IC Compiler, so I met up with two folks at DAC to get a better idea of what this new Fusion technology was all about where the barriers between tools are changing. Michael Jackson and Rahul Deokar of Synopsys arrived on time in the press area of DAC to chat about Fusion. Historically the EDA industry has used lots of separate databases and data models, engines and fragmented flows, but now we have Fusion technology:





...

There's an old maxim that you can only improve what you measure, so quality experts have been talking about this concept for decades and our semiconductor industry has been the recipient of such practices to such an extent that we can now buy consumer products that include chips with over 5 billion transistors in them. You've probably heard that semiconductor IP vendors can offer you an incredible array of choices: Standard Cells, Memory, Processors, Interconnect, ...

In the semiconductor world we have divided our engineering talent up into many adjacent disciplines and each comes with their own job titles: Design engineers, Verification engineers, DFT engineers, Test engineers. When first silicon becomes available then everyone on the team, and especially management all have a few big questions on their mind:

• Is first silicon working?
• Do we have any functional bugs?
• Do

...