EDA

Scan chains help you test complex chip designs. But how do you test the scan chains themselves when they go wrong?

How Cadence, Intel and Xuropa accelerated the semiconductor design process by squeezing 15% more capacity out of a virtualized server farm

Assertions are already used in pre-silicon verification and can help halve debug time. So why not synthesize assertions into real logic gates in the final silicon, to catch those unexpected bugs that make validation so much harder? Here’s how.

Using a new design-partitioning tool and stacked-silicon interconnect FPGA to develop an ASIC prototyping platform that can be reprogrammed several times a day.

Characterizing standard-cell defect mechanisms helps improve IC testing

There's still debate over certain aspects of the 20nm node, but the main challenges are already being addressed. Expect to see foundries and vendors mark their turf at DAC.

Guest blogger Jeff Wilson discusses some of the subtleties involved in the effective use of dummy fill in deep sub-micron IC designs.

Correlating production test failure diagnosis with DFM analysis can help identify and understand systematic yield issues, and to find out whether they are linked to DFM violations.

Richard Pugh reflects on efforts to cut through the tangle of cables and make emulation easier.

Open-source toolchains give companies ultimate control over their development environments, but how many can really afford the resources to debug and develop their own tools? Would they be better off with a commercially supported open-source approach?