EDA Topics

Designers have been using dummy fill to address design for manufacturing for some time, but the process of simply wallpapering shapes into a design's "white space" to help it maintain planarity can no longer cope with the complex challenges presented at today's advanced process nodes. Not only is planarity harder to maintain, but there are [...]

The article offers a case study of the DFM planning and methodology applied during a shrink of Cambridge Silicon Radio's UF6000 system-on-chip from the 130nm to 65nm.

DFM is essential to differentiating your products in the market, says Luigi Capodieci

Engineering managers need to get their priorities in order for incoming process nodes, says analyst Gary Smith

The purpose of this special issue of EDA Tech Forum is to try and cut through some of the confusion and even frustration that surrounds DFM as a concept. We cannot promise “DFM for Dummies,” but we do hope to give you a sense of how you might manage the process.

A greater proportion of the layout requires more precise extraction at the 32nm and 28nm process nodes, so rules-based extraction tools can no longer deliver the accuracy needed to confirm acceptable electrical performance. Given the nature of parasitic elements in analog and mixed-signal (AMS) system-on-chip designs, designers need a parasitic extraction tool that provides gate-level, [...]

A team from RFMD describes a design upgrade for one of the company’s devices, the ML5800 transceiver. The chip is used in cordless telephones and has sold more than 20 million units. Because of constraints upon the different portions of the project and a wish to maximize reuse from the earlier chip, the company developed [...]

STMicroelectronics in Greater Noida, India recently completed an Omega2 set-top-box decoder IC targeted at HDTV markets. This article discusses how ST used Mentor Graphics’ Olympus-SoC software to address the closure challenges presented by a very large design. It describes how the design team used the tool suite’s chip assembly, concurrent multi-corner multi-mode (MCMM) analysis and [...]

One year after the publication of a draft, the analog and mixed-signal (AMS) extensions to SystemC AMS will be issued as a standard at the Design Automation and Test in Europe conference in Dresden in March 2010. At this point, SystemC/SystemC AMS will become the first ESL technology to cover continuous time modeling as well [...]

The USB 3.0 specification was approved in 2008 and the first certified products to take advantage of its SuperSpeed (5Gbit/s) were launched at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. As more support for the standard becomes available, engineers will find themselves considering the specification’s implementation on all types of system projects during the course [...]