Those of you familiar with San Francisco may have traveled a beautiful seaside stretch of road called the Great Highway, which runs from Ocean Beach down to the zoo. The portion south of Golden Gate Park is less traveled and passes through sparsely vegetated dunes with no intersecting roads. However, even though the road is isolated from the Sunset District’s vehicular traffic, the beach is made accessible to local pedestrians via a series of crosswalks protected by stoplights.

Coursing down this way at 2 in the morning, you’ve got a good chance of being … Read More → "Take as Much Time as You Need"

These are interesting times at Cadence. A bit too interesting. If you read some of the press blips over the last few weeks, it’s over; investors have given up; time to fold the tent and go home.

Wha? How could a solid EDA denizen find itself in such a position? And is it really over? Or is the press exaggerating? (Although really, since when does the press exaggerate?)

OK, granted, the stock price is at around 1994 levels (adjusted for splits). I’m not one to follow the financials as much as the … Read More → "Battered and Bedraggled"

In yet another example of the ascendance of analog considerations, simulation of analog behavior – whether in outright analog circuits or in the secret analog life of digital circuits – has risen to the level of problem that needs solving. SPICE is the mother’s milk of analog simulation, but, in the spirit of actually getting things done in a finite amount of time, SPICE has been divided into the “Fast SPICE” side of things, where you trade off some accuracy for the ability to see results sooner, and full SPICE, which takes longer to run … Read More → "Spicing Up Simulation"

The wild wind whistles strange through the bright gloom of eternal daylight in the tightly-sealed semiconductor fab.  In the power-assured place where progress never pauses – where cryptically-coded wafers plod persistently through mysterious machines in the acrid vacuum of the billion-dollar bay-and-chase clean room – where white-suited phantoms pass silicon slices through evil rays and deadly potions and spinning saws… something is amiss.

In the nooks and crannies of nanometer features – in the spaces between the spaces – in the places where the design rule checkers never checked, engineers never engineered, and vectors never … Read More → "The Haunting of Fab 51"

Passing beyond a looking glass has been a useful metaphor for any topsy-turvy, head-spinning, when-will-this-trip-be-over, bizarro-world experience ever since Lewis Carroll bestowed it upon us. It’s that feeling that you’re stuck in a strange dream somewhere, where croquet balls unroll and run away, queens chop heads off willy-nilly (OK, to be fair, she didn’t chop them off… she had people that were supposed to do that), where what should make sense doesn’t and what shouldn’t does.

The looking-glass concept can be applied on three levels within … Read More → "Through the Looking Glass"