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Mentor Graphics is a US-based electronic design automation (EDA) multinational corporation for electrical engineering and electronics, headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon. Founded in 1981, the company was acquired by Siemens in 2017. Since 2021, the former Mentor Graphics operates as a division at Siemens named Siemens EDA.
Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools work together in a design flow that chip designers use to design and analyze entire semiconductor chips. Since a modern semiconductor chip can have billions of components, EDA tools are essential for their design; this article in particular describes EDA specifically with respect to integrated circuits (ICs).
Synopsys is an American electronic design automation company that focuses on silicon design and verification, silicon intellectual property and software security and quality. Products include logic synthesis, behavioral synthesis, place and route, static timing analysis, formal verification, hardware description language simulators, and transistor-level circuit simulation. The simulators include development and debugging environments that assist in the design of the logic for chips and computer systems. In recent years, Synopsys has expanded its products and services to include application security testing. Their technology is present in self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and internet of things consumer products.
CADSTAR is a Windows-based electronic design automation (EDA) software tool for designing and creating schematic diagrams and printed circuit boards (PCBs). It provides engineers with a tool for designing simple or complex, multilayer PCBs. CADSTAR spans schematic capture, variant management, placement, automatic and high-speed routing, signal integrity, power integrity, EMC analysis, design rule checks and production of manufacturing data.
OrCAD Systems Corporation was a software company that made OrCAD, a proprietary software tool suite used primarily for electronic design automation (EDA). The software is used mainly by electronic design engineers and electronic technicians to create electronic schematics, perform mixed-signal simulation and electronic prints for manufacturing printed circuit boards. OrCAD was taken over by Cadence Design Systems in 1999 and was integrated with Cadence Allegro since 2005.
Integrated circuit design, or IC design, is a sub-field of electronics engineering, encompassing the particular logic and circuit design techniques required to design integrated circuits, or ICs. ICs consist of miniaturized electronic components built into an electrical network on a monolithic semiconductor substrate by photolithography.
Signal integrity or SI is a set of measures of the quality of an electrical signal. In digital electronics, a stream of binary values is represented by a voltage waveform. However, digital signals are fundamentally analog in nature, and all signals are subject to effects such as noise, distortion, and loss. Over short distances and at low bit rates, a simple conductor can transmit this with sufficient fidelity. At high bit rates and over longer distances or through various mediums, various effects can degrade the electrical signal to the point where errors occur and the system or device fails. Signal integrity engineering is the task of analyzing and mitigating these effects. It is an important activity at all levels of electronics packaging and assembly, from internal connections of an integrated circuit (IC), through the package, the printed circuit board (PCB), the backplane, and inter-system connections. While there are some common themes at these various levels, there are also practical considerations, in particular the interconnect flight time versus the bit period, that cause substantial differences in the approach to signal integrity for on-chip connections versus chip-to-chip connections.
Design Closure is a part of the digital electronic design automation workflow by which an integrated circuit design is modified from its initial description to meet a growing list of design constraints and objectives.
SPEED2000 is a software package designed for electromagnetic simulation for the analysis and design of high-speed electronic systems. It combines an electromagnetic field solver with circuit and transmission line simulations which allows it to compute dynamic electromagnetic interactions within integrated circuits. SPEED2000 provides electrical analysis of integrated circuit (IC) packages and printed circuit boards (PCBs). It is developed and marketed by Sigrity, Inc.
CR-5000 is Zuken's design suite for electronics systems and printed circuit boards aimed at the enterprise market. It was developed to tackle complex design needs that involve managing the complete development and manufacturing preparation process on an enterprise-wide scale. CR-5000 offers relevant functionality for the design of complex and high-speed boards, addressing design challenges such as signal integrity and electromagnetic compatibility.
Cadence Design Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, California, is an American multinational computational software company, founded in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. The company produces software, hardware and silicon structures for designing integrated circuits, systems on chips (SoCs) and printed circuit boards.
Package on a package (PoP) is an integrated circuit packaging method to vertically combine discrete logic and memory ball grid array (BGA) packages. Two or more packages are installed atop each other, i.e. stacked, with a standard interface to route signals between them. This allows higher component density in devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA), and digital cameras, at the cost of slightly higher height requirements. Stacks with more than 2 packages are uncommon, due to heat dissipation considerations.
In integrated circuit design, physical design is a step in the standard design cycle which follows after the circuit design. At this step, circuit representations of the components of the design are converted into geometric representations of shapes which, when manufactured in the corresponding layers of materials, will ensure the required functioning of the components. This geometric representation is called integrated circuit layout. This step is usually split into several sub-steps, which include both design and verification and validation of the layout.
PathWave Design is a division of Keysight Technologies that was formerly called EEsof. It is a provider of electronic design automation (EDA) software that helps engineers design products such as cellular phones, wireless networks, radar, satellite communications systems, and high-speed digital wireline infrastructure. Applications include electronic system level (ESL), high-speed digital, RF-Mixed signal, device modeling, RF and Microwave design for commercial wireless, aerospace, and defense markets.
Altos Design Automation, Inc. was an electronic design automation software company. Altos developed and marketed cell and semiconductor intellectual property (IP) characterization tools that created library views for timing, signal integrity and power analysis and optimization. The Altos tools were fully automated and the company claimed that its tools are extremely fast. The Altos tools were used by engineers employing both corner-based and statistical-based design implementation flows to reduce time-to -market and improve yield.
AWR Corporation is an electronic design automation (EDA) software company, formerly known as Applied Wave Research, and then acquired by National Instruments
In the automated design of integrated circuits, signoff checks is the collective name given to a series of verification steps that the design must pass before it can be taped out. This implies an iterative process involving incremental fixes across the board using one or more check types, and then retesting the design. There are two types of sign-off's: front-end sign-off and back-end sign-off. After back-end sign-off the chip goes to fabrication. After listing out all the features in the specification, the verification engineer will write coverage for those features to identify bugs, and send back the RTL design to the designer. Bugs, or defects, can include issues like missing features, errors in design, etc. When the coverage reaches a maximum% then the verification team will sign it off. By using a methodology like UVM, OVM, or VMM, the verification team develops a reusable environment. Nowadays, UVM is more popular than others.
Nimbic, Inc. was a company that developed Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software. The company was founded in 2006 and was headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States.
Power integrity or PI is an analysis to check whether the desired voltage and current are met from source to destination. Today, power integrity plays a major role in the success and failure of new electronic products. There are several coupled aspects of PI: on the chip, in the chip package, on the circuit board, and in the system. Four main issues must be resolved to ensure power integrity at the printed circuit board level:
- Keep the voltage ripple at the chips pads lower than the specification
- Control ground bounce
- Control electromagnetic interference and maintain electromagnetic compatibility: the power distribution network is generally the largest set of conductors on the circuit board and therefore the largest (unwanted) antenna for emission and reception of noise.
- Maintaining a proper DC Voltage level at the load at high currents. A modern processor or field-programmable gate array can pull 1-100 Amps at sub-1V VDD levels with AC and DC margins in the tens of millivolts. Very little DC voltage drop can thus be tolerated on the power distribution network.
Specctra is a commercial PCB auto-router originally developed by John F. Cooper and David Chyan of Cooper & Chyan Technology, Inc. (CCT) in 1989. The company and product were taken over by Cadence Design Systems in May 1997. Since its integration into Cadence's Allegro PCB Editor, the name of the router is Allegro PCB Router. The latest version is 17.2.
References
- "National Science Foundation SBIR Award", An Ultra-Fast Signal Integrity Analyzer for Multi-Layer Electronic Packages and Boards, January 1, 1997.
- "SI Problems", Book Chapter, Engineering Electromagnetic Compatibility, 2nd Edition, IEEE Press & John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001.
- "EDN Hot Product Award", EDN, December 14, 2007.
- "Packaging Goes Vertical", EE Times", November 24, 2008.
- "PCB Signal Integrity, Power Integrity and EMC Challenges", PCDandF, December 2008.
- "DC Design Squeeze", PCDandF, January 2009.