EDA Topics

Accounting for on-chip variation (OCV) has become a critical factor in assuring timing closure for nanometer-scale ICs and avoiding over-pessimistic margins.

IEEE 1801-2013 updates and refines the Unified Power Format for low-power VLSI design, reflecting changes in power modeling and verification.

Real-valued modelling provides a way of speeding up the simulation of SoCs with significant analog content through the use of discrete-event solvers.

The technique enables early software development and hardware/software co-design strategies before a project is more rigidly defined in RTL.

A guide to emerging 3D integration techniques for ICs, including a look at various approaches, and some of the tools and standards issues involved.

The value of the emulation market has almost doubled in the last four years as the technique becomes increasingly valuable to hardware/software co-verification.

VHDL is a hardware description language with rich constructs that can model complex systems. It can also be constrained for use as the starting point of an FPGA or ASIC design.

More than half of design companies claim to use ABV but many have yet to deploy full methodologies.

Building a prototype SoC in one or a set of FPGAs can aid field trials, software development and hardware/software integration. But it's not easy, so the decision to go ahead needs careful consideration.

Verification IP is becoming an increasingly important component for system design due to the rapid proliferation of new protocols and interfaces, chiefly driven by mobile comms.