On Monday night at DAC I was treated to dinner and entertainment courtesy of Mentor Graphics. At DAC they like to invite press, customers, vendors and now bloggers like me.
A bus whisked us away from the Moscone Center to The City Club of San Francisco. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres were free flowing followed by a [...]

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Cadence Mixed Signal

Pete McCrorie and Kishore Karnane gave a suite presentation on the Virtuoso Analog Design Environment (ADE) showing how AMS Designer gives multi-level simulation of SPICE, RTL, TLM and Behavioral languages. Circuit simulators like Spectre, Spectre Turbo, APS and UltraSim can be called from the Virtuoso GUI.
Virtuoso and Encounter are now fully integrated together [...]

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ATEEDA

David Hamilton, CEO at ATEEDA introduced me to his company where they help cut the cost of testing analog pins on your IC by using conventional digital testers.
OptimATE has been around for two years and it is a software tool used by design or test engineers to make voltage measurements on your analog pins. The [...]

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Springsoft – Custom IC Layout

Duncan McDonald presented in their suite about the custom IC layout editing of Laker, along with the P&R provided by Pyxis.
Because these tools use Open Access (OA) in runtime memory there are no files to export then import again in a sequential flow, rather all the tools can be running concurrently [...]

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Neal Carney met with me on Monday afternoon to provide an update on what’s new at this hard IP company. They acquired Blaze DFM in the last year and are offering two products: PowerTrim and AreaTrim.TSMC is their exclusive partner using these new 1D layout cells that provide improved performance and yield at 65nm nodes [...]

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Mephisto

Kenneth Francken, CEO at Mephisto explained how his tools will help make analog designers more efficient by helping them to do analog IP verification, IP migration and IP creation. This Belgium-based start-up kind of competes with what the Neolinear tools at Cadence provide but then adds a more sophisticated test bench composer and automated documentation [...]

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CustomSim & HSPICE

Christopher Labrecque, Marketing Manager for Analog & Mixed Signal made a suite presentation on CustomSim which includes circuit simulators like: HSPICE, HSIM, NanoSim and XA. Fredrik Ivarsson, Senior Corporate AE demonstrated the tools running on a laptop.Slides showed that HSPICE has sped up about 5X in the past 2 years and that with [...]

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I met with Simon Butler of Methodics, along with Joe Fowler of Fowler Communications to learn about how former Cadence people started the company to help hardware designers benefit from software methodologies. They define Design Data Management (DM) as integrating Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools into the Cadence tool flow.
Instead of creating yet another SCM [...]

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What is a virtual IDM?
To me it is the collaboration of ARM, Chartered, IBM, Samsung and Synopsys as they announced on Monday morning how they are collaborating on vertically optimized technology for 32nm and 28nm mobile SOC designs. I think that this virtual IDM will find some competition from the likes of Intel in the [...]

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