Walden Rhines The official mission statement of the EDA Consortium (EDAC) says that the organization exists “to promote the health of the EDA industry, and to increase awareness of the crucial role EDA plays in today’s global economy.” EDAC’s chairman Wally Rhines, also chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, amplifies this by explaining that the […]
Kerry Bernstein When Kerry Bernstein, a 28-year IBM veteran, was first drafted to work on Big Blue’s development of 3D semiconductors, he admits he was a skeptic. “At first, I think I felt as though I’d got dragged into this program. I thought it wasn’t going anywhere. I thought it was going to go anywhere. […]
Joe Costello The dominant theme for DAC 2006 is multimedia, games and entertainment. So how does Cadence Design Systems founder and former CEO Joe Costello fit into that? He is after all giving the conference’s Monday keynote. Let’s do the ticklist. EDA credentials? Dated – he left Cadence in 1998 – but basically a ‘check’. […]
Design-for-manufacturability (DFM) has become pervasive and there is general agreement on the need to apply DFM at multiple stages of the design cycle. DFM techniques at the relatively mature 0.13um technology node entail well known enhancements such as contact and via redundancy, line-ends and borders, and wire spreading. Mature technology nodes achieve product yields which, […]
T he explosion in consumer electronics, especially in the wireless/handheld devices marketplace, has placed a tremendous technical and business burden on engineers in the design of these products. Design teams carry the responsibility of catering to often conflicting and always challenging product specifications. The product needs to be optimized on multiple demand vectors with little […]
Introduction The emergence of the SystemVerilog and PSL assertion languages promises to improve the effectiveness of existing verification flows. First, assertions give better local observability of the functionality they represent. Second, the assertions augment the textual specification to provide a more formal, executable representation of the functionality. Third, since the assertion languages have common semantics […]
DATE 06 (March 6-10) is the ninth edition of the Design Automation and Test in Europe conference and the organizers have again received a record number of submissions, this year 834. This reflects the fact that today DATE is not merely a European conference but has become a well-known global event, receiving paper proposals and […]
For years, ASIC and FPGA designers have shared the goal of having totally reusable intellectual property (IP) blocks. This goal has been partially fulfilled, with the introduction of high-level hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog, and powerful Register Transfer Level (RTL) synthesis tools in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, with a […]
More phlegmatic reactions to January’s Consumer Electronics Show were that it was “just like last year, only more so.” And, indeed, the big headlines went once more, to the companies that could claim bragging rights for 100-inch plus plasma screens; to Microsoft and Intel in their aggressive determination to force themselves beyond the PC and […]
For peripheral card and system manufacturers, delivering low-latency high-performance computing solutions at affordable prices has been an insurmountable barrier. Although processor speeds and bandwidth have taken quantum leaps over the last decade, the last few inches between the adapter slot and system CPU represent a bottleneck that restricts the development of cost-effective high-performance computing solutions. […]