IC Implementation

FinFETs present a number of problems with respect to dynamic power consumption. Design techniques are being re-evaluated to deal with the issue.

Emulation is now served by all three leading vendors and is a hot topic for discussion among engineers. The major verification conferences need to follow suit.

Designers working on automotive ICs, to be built on established processes, can benefit from the power of design tools developed for advanced processes.

Precise curved geometries are vital to making this emerging and cost-effective CMOS-based technology work. This primer explains its advantages and how litho tools are evolving to meet the challenges it presents.

Combining assertion-based verification techniques with emulation makes for easier debug, better coverage and greater functional efficiency.

A look under the hood of IC Compiler II, Synopsys' next-generation netlist-to-GDSII implementation system.

Soft blocking to prevent cell spreading and other placement-optimization techniques helped improve power and clock speed on a Cortex-M7 test chip designed by ARM and Cadence.

ARM and TSMC used an extensive pre-planning process, including a static analysis of each module's overall logic structure, to put together a 2.3GHz processor design based around ARM's main 64bit Big.Little pairing for the foundry's 16nm finFET process.

How tuning a design flow can help optimize SoC processor cores for power, performance and area - and make it possible to do different optimisations for different cores on the same SoC.

How EDA tools are evolving to make it possible to design with finFET processes.