Custom IC Design

Video Demo: ViVA-XL - Fast Waveform Viewing

AMSamirj — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:16:00 GMT

It’s happened to each of us at some point in time. Your long simulation is finally complete and you eagerly load up the crucial results you’ve impatiently been waiting for. Much to your chagrin, your waveform tool grinds to a halt as it chokes on your enormous signals. Designers can completely avoid this spinning hourglass scenario by taking advantage of the fast waveform viewing capabilities in ViVA-XL and our MMSIM simulators. In this demo I cover how to enable fast waveforms, explore the data created, and show off how fast it really is. There are additional details in this sourcelink solution. Just like in my first post, you can view the demo in full HD.

Low resolution version:

HD version (takes a moment to load):

Custom IC design, layouts, and productivity

TomC — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:35:00 GMT

There is a definite challenge in maintaining productivity when it comes to realizing a design. Anything that helps the layout with increasing productivity does it for me. All the marketing and management buzz words apply here; design complexity with shrinking time to market.

For layout designers in the custom and analog/mixed signal arena, who have increasing productivity demands, Virtuoso IC 6.1.3 and the Virtuoso Layout Suite opens the door to making gains against design complexity and the ever shrinking time to market.

Once introduced to Virtuoso Layout Suite, the designer quickly sees it provides an ease of use that has been documented to increase productivity independent of process. Offering an easy to learn environment to realize your designs, for newcomers or existing users of Virtuoso, productivity gains come quickly to the design team. For current users it starts with something as simple as that none of the bindkeys changes unless you want them to. Add to that a standard Windows-look toolbars and menus further adds to how quickly a designer masters the Virtuoso Layout Suite. And being Windows-like, there are multiple tabs making it easier to work with multiple designs, search capabilities, and configurable workspaces all of which are the stuff that modern user interfaces are made of.

A dynamic layout canvas utilizes assistants that are either docked or not, placing features within view of the designer. When no longer needed, the assistants disappear returning full view of the canvas.

The Virtuoso Layout Suite is the custom layout environment which offers customer proven productivity improvements that enhances design robustness with an ease of use. It comes down to productivity with an ever increasing levels of design complexity with shrinking time to market. But that is just me, and it has left me curious if you think the same. I would be interested in knowing what your experiences have been.

Custom IC design and design environments

TomC — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:32:00 GMT

Design environments have come quite a long way from the time I began my engineering career. It is amazing to see how far we have come from stitching together designs as netlists to run rudimentary simulations, to today’s integrated tools with validation required across a plethora of conditions. In those days, I also remember you only needed one engineer per chip.

With today's levels of design complexity, additional tool capabilities are required and yet there are almost as many opinions on the right strategy as there are custom design engineers..... Maybe more!!. However, solutions are starting to coalesce to meet these challenges with one of the biggest challenges coming from capturing the designer intent as additional IP to leverage subsequent reuse/retargeting.

Design strategies and the environments to support today's designs, are not something that happens overnight, but takes time to evolve. With close relationships between EDA vendors and their customers, they mature into tools that can take on the designs of today, while adding the productivity and collaboration required to meet ever tightening deadlines. This is of course, not forgetting the quality goals of the design and the process itself, while allowing for more flexibility and creativity of an ever-increasing design team.

I’m curious about what you think. How have you seen circuit design and analysis change over the past 5-10-20 years and what do think are the next challenges?

Thanks Mr. Colton: Imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery

NewYorkSteve — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Recognize the name Charles Caleb Colton? No? He was a British writer who in 1820 coined the phrase, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." His words could not ring more true today. With some amusement, I watched the unveiling of a "new and revolutionary" custom design product on Monday, September 22.

As I watched, I could not help to see that it had an umistakable familiarity (which was also highlighted). It "looked" very similar to the previous generation of Cadence's own Virtuoso software. Capabilities that Virtuoso has had for years, were demonstrated proudly and touted as "revolutionary". Actually when they were developed by Cadence all those years ago, they were revolutionary for an industry steeped in using netlists and a vi editor. "New" custom design comes in using design constraints inside Virtuoso to maintain the intent of the design throughout the process. "Revolutionary" comes by introducing new layout techniques such as module generators And lastly "forward thinking" in mixed-signal comes by combining the power of the Virtuoso and Encounter platform to cut the mixed-signal implementaiton cycle by 25%.

But for me the coup de grace was their "new and revolutionary" marketing campaign for this tool.

Look familiar? It should. Cadence also developed and used a similar marketing campaign in 2006 to launch our new Virtuoso. I was personally involved deeply in the development of the Virtuoso marketing campaign and take great delight in seeing the idea copied.

Well, there you have it.

Our newest bundle of joy ... please welcome Virtuoso IC6.1.3

NewYorkSteve — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:07:00 GMT

Folks, I am pleased to announce the delivery of the latest Virtuoso platform. It was a long labor, but father and baby are doing well. One of the reasons that we took a bit longer with this release is because we wanted to make sure it was "right" on 3 counts: Stability, Infrastructure Reliability and Advanced Technology. (See the press release here.)

We worked with 18 different customers to test the myriad of different set-ups and custom flows they have developed over the years with IC 6.1.3 to get rid of the "gotchas" that always seem to plague first releases of software. Infrastructure availability was also key to make sure that machines were properly configured, commercial design management tools and thin-clients worked, and that process design kits would be available.

We are pleased to announce 22 PDKs (including variants) available today each optimized and tested for the Virtuoso design flow. Lastly, with new optimization and design centering, routing, and turbo simulation technology in place and ready to go, the new Virtuoso continues to handle the simplest and the most complex custom designs throughout the industry.

Thanks to all of you for your 20 years of support, and we look forward to next 20 years!

Latest Virtuoso news from CDNLive!

NewYorkSteve — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:03:00 GMT

Hey Folks, thanks to all of you who participated in CDNLive SV. There was a lot of great information shared by our customers as to their success using teh latest Virtuoso (which by the way has a new version IC6.1.3 out on downloads).

Three presentations that I would call your attention to come from our customers Freescale, Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics. Each found new and interesting ways of using the advanced features of the Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL/GXL and the Virtuoso Layout Suite XL/GXL.

In the case of Freescale, they reported significant improvements in their design and verification productivity by taking advantage of the multiple-testbench capabilities, along with the updated corners analysis and new data displaywhich could speed their analysis of data from many sources simultaneously.

ST reported their success in getting a 30% boost in layout productivity by taking advantage of the usability changes and the new integrated router inside the Virtuoso Layout Suite. And finally TI reported on their use of corners, monte carlo and optimization to increase their confidence that their circuits were going to achieve their yield targets once they went to manufacturing.

Each of these successes was made possible because of the maturing of the new Virtuoso, and its ability to handle complex tasks as easily as the simple basic tasks. This continuum of flexibility it what we strove for in the new geenration of Virtuoso, and that labor has come to a spectacular fruition.

Video Demo: Spectre Turbo - Fasten your Seatbelts!!

AMSamirj — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:03:00 GMT

Although Spectre Turbo was released back in April, I hadn't found time to fully tinker with it. As I explored the idea of highlighting it on the community site, I tested it on at least 6 different designs, from VCOs to PLLs, testing both pre and post-layout, and Spectre Turbo chewed right through my sims. It not only drastically shortened my sim times but also maintained spice accuracy and that’s why I absolutely wanted to feature it. See my demo below. Here's the white paper I mention and there are additional details in this sourcelink solution.

Low resolution version:

HD version (may be a little slow to load):

View Video
Format: flv
Duration: 5:00

CDNLive Techtorials: Everything you wanted to know about Virtuoso

NewYorkSteve — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Hey folks, if you are coming to the CDNLive conference, we have a lot of great "techtorials" happening on Monday, September 8. This will be a great opportunity to meet with our technical experts on different tools/solutions. The classes are small so you will be able to ask questions about the technology and explore how you can use it for your own design needs.

Take a look at the CDNLive webpage, under Monday and explore the offerings we have for both RF design technology and custom design technology. This is your chance to quiz the experts, don't miss it!

Is mixed-signal simulation a fantasy?

NewYorkSteve — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:40:00 GMT

The world is a mixed-signal one, or at least that's what were told. The concept of "mixed-signal" simulation has been around since my days at Daisy (some 18 years ago). And yet, the concept still struggles along.

Some blame the lack of behavioral modeling expertise. Others, that the concept of bringing together the hardest aspects of custom and standard cell design together in one fell swoop, is just too much for any one person to shoulder! And yet for others, mixed-signal simulation is a standard practice employed with all their designs.

So, what do you think? Do you run mixed-signal simulators? Do you avoid them like the plague? Either way, why do you do what you do??

Hello from the custom design corner of Cadence

NewYorkSteve — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 08:20:00 GMT

Greetings!

My name is Steve Lewis and I'm a product marketing director working in the custom design area within Cadence.

I thought I'd kick off this blog with a brief introduction. I've been with Cadence for almost 18 years, with three years additional experience working at Daisy CAE systems, a pioneer in the EDA field.

This blog will cover a wide range of topics related to analog and custom digital design: from specific tool usage all the way to pressing problems facing the custom design community and what should EDA do to help.

I look forward to sharing ideas with you.

So, where is that mixed-signal behavioral model I ordered?

Nigel — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:19:00 GMT

It has been said many time that SPICE, the analog engineers tool of choice, is virtually the same as it was 20 years ago, while digital engineers have been happily zooming up the evolutionary chain. There have been a number of attempts to prod analog designers into closing the gap with the introduction of behavioral modeling languages, and more abstract system modeling solutions. However, they are not widely adopted, much to the disappointment of the EDA vendors that provide them. So why not?

Analog designs are, by their very nature, multidimensional, and any assumptions you make to model one circuit are completely inappropriate to model another. Modeling requires that you make some decisions on which characteristics are important and which are not, with more decisions needed on which conditions to model over, and which to ignore. So standardized modeling techniques go out the window, leaving every model as unique as the design it replicates.

This isn't all doom and gloom, since there are many ways to leverage behavioral modeling. In the early years of the behavioral languages, users discovered that they could leave the design alone and instead model the test fixtures. Since only the design under test remains in SPICE, the simulations run faster and the test fixtures are more readily reusable

Today, there are more tools coming out to support the model creation process and they adopt a variety of different strategies, from fully automatic to designer assisted. Also the modeling languages themselves are getting faster and more efficient, such that there is more impetus to push for modeling expertise within a company.

My own personal opinion is that automated tools can be very effective on some circuits, and useless on most, leaving many engineers without support. So a company has to invest in some level of modeling expertise to get the best out of the behavioral simulation technology.

Cadence is taking a number of approaches in this arena. The first is to provide a multi-disciplinary simulation solution to handle the broad range of requirements. So with MMSIM 7.X from the Virtuoso platform, you can happily simulate at the SPICE or fast-SPICE level and move up to the behavioral level as it makes sense.

For model creation, Virtuoso Analog Design Environment GXL in IC 6.X includes a Model calibration option. This enables experienced modelers to create a library of adaptable models that are flexible enough to adapt to a number of design variants. The end user can automatically configure them to their specific designs, making reuse more practical for the majority of engineers and across many design types. In both cases the control is left in the hands of the design engineer.

This is an interesting time, as the majority of designs now have both analog and digital content. The need for an effective AMS solution with modeling technology in support has never been more necessary and the EDA vendors are rising to the challenge.

What are your thoughts on this?