Innocence is ignorance. And ignorance is bliss. The messy, inconvenient details and realities of the world can be an incredible buzzkill, and it’s just nicer to abstract them away as unnecessary refinements, third-order effects. Or perhaps nuisances that some specialist can be assigned to take care of.

The world is analog. We are repeatedly told that, as if by dint of exposure we will somehow acquire an appreciation for the madness that is unleashed by viewing the world through an analog lens. But it never happens. Most of us breathe a … Read More → "Loss of Innocence"

Let’s face it.  Some designers refuse to learn a new language.  Or, the prospect of learning object-oriented programming makes some people break out in hives.  Or, the old way is still just fine.  Or, there’s not enough time in the schedule to get everyone trained.  Or, there’s no budget for training.

Whatever the case may be, you find yourself at the beginning of a project, and there are not enough people to do the verification work needed.  Most designers have learned TCL scripting … Read More → "Using VMM, DPI, and TCL to Leverage Verification and Enable Early Testing, Emulation, and Validation"

Judging by advertising and datasheets and other promotional materials, verification is pretty much a simple, clear-cut, well-solved problem. Actually, that’s not quite true. Judging by any of those docs, verification was a complex, obtuse, poorly-solved problem until we released our last product, after which it’s become simple, clear-cut, and well-solved. Yeah, that’s more like it.

Of course, experience or any candid conversation reveals otherwise. Many tools and techniques have been developed over the last few years to address the burgeoning verification burden, but they remain … Read More → "TCL Drives C Drives SystemVerilog"

Of course analog engineers themselves had a different view. Increasingly they saw EDA tools bring automation to digital circuit design, particularly in layout. They, on the other hand, still had to design by hand and by intellect, since they were dealing with much more complex issues than a stream of zeroes and ones, highs and lows. And, unlike for digital, there was only a handful of universities providing training in analog technologies.

Sometime at the end of the twentieth century, things started to change. Suddenly analog and mixed signal started getting above itself. Handheld consumer devices, like … Read More → "A New Analog Golden Age?"