EDA and IP

Intel’s semiconductor foundry capability in 14nm process technology is a key element in its planned acquisition of Altera. Process quality and die yield are important factors for the foundry business and Intel has decided to support its 14nm platform, which includes the second generation of tri-gate transistors, by offering foundry customers, including the FPGA firm, reliability verification using Mentor Graphics’ Calibre PERC tool. ...

Sony is to license its LDAC hi-res audio technology in an attempt to kick-start the market.

Cadence Design Systems has implemented root-cause analysis in its latest chip design debug tools. It relies on deeper and more comprehensive data gathering and is claimed to identify problems faster than traditional transaction-level debug methods which requires more than one iteration to extract data points needed to identify the source of the bug Called Indago, the debug tools handles the ...

Mentor Graphics has redefined its PCB design tools with three software packages at price-points to address different parts of the design market, and some it is addressing for the first time. The standard product, called PADS is available for $5,000 to be affordable by engineers in small to mid-sized companies, or members of an isolated team within a larger companies performing ...

Today is World IP Day. To mark it the UK Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys has published an IP manifesto called An Economy of Ideas.

Google is putting its LTE patents into the patent pool run by Dolby Labs subsidiary Via Licensing.

sureCore, the Sheffield low power SRAM IP company, has licensed SRAM IP from Imec.

The most efficient 8051 microcontroller core ever, is the claim of Polish intellectual property firm Digital Core Designs (DCD). Called DQ8051, the quad pipeline core benchmarks at 0.27292 DMips/MHz (Dhrystone 2.1) “29.01 times speed-up over the original 80C51 chip operating at the same frequency,” said the firm. “But the speed is not all. Dynamic power consumption can be as low ...

Silicon-based hacking problems are not yet seen as a threat to security on the internet. But this may be because any breaches of security at the silicon level are not reported. It could also be because there are easier ways to penetrate computer networks. Most of the security problems which the internet is seeing are because people are hacking intro ...

Mentor Graphics is bringing together the IC design, package design and PCB layout in a single tool environment. The design environment called Xpedition Package Integrator flow can be used to integrate existing IC, package and PCB design tools from Mentor and even third party tools. According to Mentor, the integration of the different areas of design has happened because there ...