EDA Topics

Morris Chang was in on the ground floor of IC innovation at TI and remains there today as chairman of TSMC. Paul Dempsey reports.

FPGA-based signal processing has traditionally been implemented using fixed-point operations, but high-performance floating-point signal processing can now be implemented. This paper describes how floating-point technology for FPGAs can deliver processing rates of one tril- lion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) on a single die.

Sematech, the leading research consortium for semiconductor manufacturing, has launched a campaign to recruit members from the fabless sector. The move reflects the importance of making manufacturing decisions earlier in the design flow, and is also intended to get input from designers on implementations of such technologies as 3D interconnects, next-generation lithography and novel materials/structures.

Characterizing PLL jitter is important yet challenging. Usually done through transistor-level transient analysis, a slow simulation speed has been the major bottleneck preventing jitter from being characterized in a timely manner. This paper presents an approach for fast jitter characterization using mixed-signal simulation (a combination of transistor-level blocks and calibrated behavioral models). Among various PLL [...]

Assertions and assertion-based verification (ABV) are hot topics, but many engineering teams remain unfamiliar with the benefits they bring to the design and verification process. This article discusses the rationale behind them, the value they bring across the design and verification process, and offers a step-by-step approach to implementing them.

This paper describes Medea, a NoC-based framework that uses a hybrid shared-memory/message-passing approach. It has been modeled in a fast, cycle-accurate SystemC implementation enabling rapid system exploration while varying several parameters such as the number and type of cores, cache size and policy, and specific NoC features. Also, each SystemC block has its RTL counterpart [...]

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing continues to be dogged by a technologically and economically inefficient landscape where too many products demand their own bespoke processes and packages. However, the last three years have seen third-party foundries gain more influence over the sector, bringing greater demands for reuse and DFM considerations, earlier in the design flow. The [...]

Timing closure is a key challenge for today’s complex system-on-chip designs. Static timing analysis (STA) tools automatically analyze signal paths in a design and identify timing-critical paths that limit the clock frequency that can be achieved. Paths that can never be functionally activated or that require multiple cycles for correct operation can be identified as [...]

Simulation speed is a key issue for the virtual prototyping (VP) of multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs). The SystemC transaction level modeling (TLM) 2.0 scheme accelerates simulation by using interface method calls (IMC) to implement communication between hardware components. Acceleration can also be achieved using parallel simulation. Multicore workstations are moving into the computing mainstream, and symmetric [...]

Knowing where your application is consuming resources is a crucial step in minimizing energy usage. The article describes a toolset developed by high-profile ARM-based microcontroller (MCU) start-up Energy Micro that helps to achieve this overarching goal within the context of a parallel move to 32bit MCU resolution.