FPGA Central

IC Journal Update




a techfocus media publication :: May 5, 2009 :: volume VI, no. 05









FROM THE EDITOR



So you're at the tail end of the rush to ship the latest technology libraries. The circuits are getting bigger and more complex, and you've got to characterize them so that designers know how they will work. And, as usual, they haven't given you much information on what's in the cell; there's got to be a better way to figure out how the thing is supposed to work. This week we look at what Magma is doing with their SiliconSmart tool to make this easier.

Thanks for reading! We love to get your feedback and suggestions; please send either or both to:
comments (AT) ICJournal (DOT) com. You can also make yourself heard publicly by going to our Journal Forums.

Bryon Moyer - Editor
IC Design and Verification Journal









EVENTS & ANNOUNCEMENTS











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LATEST NEWS



May 5, 2009



29 Panel Sessions in 46th Design Automation Conference Program Cover Wide Range of Issues Affecting Chip Design, Technology, Business



EVE Integrates Latest Xilinx ISE Design Suite into its Emulation Platforms



NMI Conference Presentation by Solido Design CTO to Address Variability Challenges for Analog and Mixed-Signal Design



May 4, 2009



Agilent Technologies to Present Three Technical Sessions at 2009 Informa LTE World Summit



Ansoft Tools Couple With ANSYS For Real-World Simulation



May 1, 2009



Open-Silicon, Inc. Introduces TestMAXTM



April 30, 2009



Agilent Technologies, Datang Holdings to Collaborate in Increasing Global Competitiveness of TD-SCDMA Industry



April 29, 2009



Agilent Technologies' Advanced Design System EDA Software Has Expanded Role in Skyworks' RF Module Design



ADLINK Announces New Addition to Family of Bus Expansion Products



10th Annual ISQED’09 Announces Award Winners









CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES



Library Science
Magma’s SiliconSmart, Now With Functional Recognition (Bryon Moyer)
More Than A Zen Thing
A Look at Functional Qualification
(Bryon Moyer)
Does Noise Analysis Accuracy Really Matter?
by Michael Jacobs and Trisha Kristof, Cadence Design Systems
Bringing It Together – Some of It, Anyway
Synopsys Announces Lynx and Discovery
(Bryon Moyer)
But What Does It Mean?
Tagging, Indexing, and Querying Behaviors in RTL Designs (Bryon Moyer)
Finding Waldo
A Look at Silicon Debug – After You’ve Got Silicon
(Bryon Moyer)




JOURNAL WEBCASTS



CHALK TALK Confirma™: The Next Era Of Prototyping. Struggling with FPGA prototyping boards? Join Amelia Dalton as she talks with Juergen Jaeger of Synopsys about the Next Era of Rapid Prototyping. (Synopsys)

CHALK TALK Catapult C Synthesis Designing a JPEG Compression Engine. Amelia Dalton finds out that designing hardware with high-level languages can be both easy and fun as she and Stuart Clubb of Mentor Graphics walk you through the design of a hardware JPEG encoder using C++. (Mentor Graphics).



CHALK TALK Power Matters. Trying to tame power consumption in your battery-powered device? Join Journal Webcasts host Amelia Dalton as she chats with Wendy Lockhart of Actel about how you can use ultra-low power programmable devices from Actel in even the most power-sensitive designs. (Actel)



[click here for more webcasts]












Library Science
Magma’s SiliconSmart, Now With Functional Recognition
(Bryon Moyer)

ICs are made primarily with transistors, adorned here and there with the odd resistor or capacitor. The intentional ones, that is. Yes, the parasitics are everywhere. And we’re excepting DRAMs here. Their capacitors are odd, but in the bizarre sense, not in the rare sense.

And yet most IC designers never touch a transistor. Particularly digital designers. For them, transistors are buried deep below layers of abstraction, hidden safely inside the library, where all is dark and mysterious. Transistors can be summoned by describing behaviors in, say, C, from which they can be morphed into RTL, which then gets transmogrified into gates, which get munged into combinations of library cells, wherein lie transistors.

In order for most designers to be spared the indignity of managing individual transistors, someone has to do the work of making sure that the libraries are solid. And this is the under-appreciated task of the under-loved library team. [more]






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