Beyond promoting the polygon-pushing power of parallel processing, Mentor’s presentation also highlighted an interesting reality of today’s Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry – nanometer class design tools are getting bigger, faster, more sophisticated, more expensive, and consequently, more exclusive. Among the customers heaping praises on Caliber nmDRC for its parallelizing prowess were AMD and Intel – hardly the novice class in semiconductor design.

It is no secret that the number of ASIC and COT (customer-owned tooling) design starts has declined steadily over the past several years and is forecast to continue declining for the foreseeable … Read More → "Electronic Elitism"

With such generic paper titles and such an auspicious article intro, what has transpired since then that has inexorably linked those two seemingly obscure technical publication events? Pretty much everything.

15,071 days later (this coming Monday, in fact,) the 43rd annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) will kick-off in San Francisco, California.

The SHARE design automation workshop, held in Atlantic City in June 1964, is now counted as DAC #1. The Electronics Magazine article, published less than a year after that seminal if inauspicious design automation event, contained a small section that threw down the gauntlet to the fledgling … Read More → "DAC Previsited"

It may be surprising that such careful engineering attention is required to gain the desired performance from this lowest echelon of racing – cars powered only by gravity and driven by kids aged 9 to 16. It might also be counter-intuitive that some of the most careful engineering for processor performance comes in the very lowest echelon of computing systems – devices where many tiny processors may be put on a single chip in a system that might sell for single-digit dollars at the retail level. Both, however, are driven by the same constraints. When power, size, and cost are all at … Read More → "Going for Speed"

Reverse engineering is not a back-alley, cloak and dagger, business-in-the-shadows affair – quite the contrary, in fact. Companies specializing in reverse engineering operate openly and have a long and public history, particularly in the semiconductor arena. In the United States, reverse engineering has the protection of law, with the Supreme Court ruling that “A trade secret law, however, does not offer protection against discovery by fair and honest means, such as by independent invention, accidental disclosure, or by so-called reverse engineering, that is by starting with the known product and working backward to divine the process which aided in … Read More → "Logic Lockdown"