One of my favorite classes in college was the lab exercise, mostly because we actually got to use real electronics and then measure something, finally writing it up in our lab notebooks. The issue today is that a college student taking Electrical Engineering probably doesn't have much access to 10nm FinFET silicon for use in a lab class, and they are probably using really out of date materials and lab exercises. At the DAC exhibit in ...

I've been a mobile device user since the 1980's when the Motorola brick phone was introduced, so I've seen an increasing amount of sensors added to each new generation of mobile phones over the years. One big challenge to both sensor companies and fabless semiconductor companies designing SoCs for mobile devices is how to efficiently connect all of that sensor technology ...

HDL languages are a matter of engineering personal preference and often corporate policy dictates which language you should be using on your next SoC design. In the early days we used our favorite text-based editor like Vi or Emacs, my choice was Vi. The problem with these text-based editors of course is that they really don't understand that you're using ...

I'm a user of many Samsung products as my family has Samsung Galaxy smart phones and my MacBook Pro uses Samsung SSD for storage, so at DAC I attended a breakfast panel with presenters from Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm. This was the second day of DAC and they served us breakfast, and with the big names on the panel the room was crowded with engineers all wanting to hear about the Samsung roadmap and how Qualcomm designed their latest SoC.

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At the recent DAC conference in Austin I attended a panel discussion over lunch where engineers from four companies talked about how they approached mixed-signal design and verification challenges for automotive and IoT systems. It seems like 2017 was the year of automotive at DAC, while in 2016 it was all about IoT. Both segments are attractive because of their size (Automotive) and growth potential (IoT). The panelists included:
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The analysts at Gary Smith EDA produce an annual What To See List for DAC and I quickly noticed that all three major EDA vendors were included on the list for the specific category of emulation. The big problem that emulation addresses is the ability to run in hardware an early version of your SoC so that software developers can get access and run lots of code or boot an OS, plus the hardware team can more quickly verify and debug the performance of their system to see that it ...

Last month at DAC I met up with Michael Munsey of Methodics to get a quick update on what has been happening over the past 12 months within his company, and he quickly invited me to watch an archived webinar on their latest tool for IP Lifecycle Management called Percipient. I love to play the board game Scrabble, so i had to Google the word Percipient to learn its meaning, "having a good understanding of things, perspective". OK, that's my new word for the day then.

We often blog about new and updated point EDA tools on SemiWiki, so it's refreshing to learn more about the category of EDA ...

I recall back in the late 1980's when logic synthesis tools were first commercialized, at first they could read in a gate-level netlist from one foundry then output an optimized netlist back into the same foundry. Next, they could migrate your gate-level netlist from Vendor A over to Vendor B, giving design companies some flexibility in negotiating the best foundry terms. Finally, they could accept ...

The bleeding edge of SoC design was on full display last month at DAC in Austin as I listened to a panel session where members talked about their specific experiences so far designing with the 7nm process node. Jim Hogan was the moderator and the panel quickly got into what their respective companies are doing with 7nm technology already. Earlier this year we heard about the first 10nm chip being used for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip, so I was quite interested to here what the next smaller node at 7nm was going to bring us.

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