Top 13 links from LinkedIn e-mails

A somewhat strange list perhaps, but I spent some Easter holidays on cleaning up my e-mail inbox. When browsing through the good old linkedIn e-mails I also scanned some of the links there. Typically the links are from the different groups. Of course there are linkedIn discussions too in there, but I chose to not include them, since not everyone uses linkedIn.

So, a list of links from the last 17 months (kind of)… Read the articles and don’t forget to follow the links provided in them!

• Avoid Misuse of Sallen-Key Filters
• Curve fitting and how it can be done
• How is ultra-low power circuits simulated?
• How to simulate different impedances, like the capacitance multiplication (Miller-ish), but also resistance bootstrapping.
• And last year, the microprocessor turned 40!
• Interesting presentations on power/speed, etc., from nVidia
• 2011 “conclusions” of the electronics’ market (from a semiconductor point of view)
• Watch out! Anyone up for a job interview?! This is for you!
• We’ve seen how analog design becomes more and more complex for low-geometry nodes – how can we improve the reliability?
• 2012 forecast of the electronics’ market (from a semiconductor point of view)
• 14nm process nodes — brrr, that’s small!
• How can different Monte Carlo analyses be performed?
• How do we automate analog design? How do we make ourselves redundant?

Special Session on Design of Heterogeneous Cyber-Physical Systems at DSD2012

Dr. Davide Quaglia (University of Verona, Italy) is arranging a special session at the 15th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design.

Scope and topics:

Future cyber-physical systems will be heterogeneous systems made of components from different domains, such as digital (hardware, software, network) and analog (electronic, electromechanical, etc., as for instance MEMS, power sources, thermal sources, sensors and actuators). To fully exploit the potential of current nanoelectronics technologies, as well as to enable the integration of existing/new IPs and “More than Moore” devices, new methodologies and tools for multi-disciplinary and multi-scale design, modeling, and simulation are needed.

Papers on any of the following and related topics can be submitted to the special session:

• Foundations of heterogeneous systems: discrete and hybrid models of computation; domain-specific languages for specification (e.g., SysML, SystemC-AMS, VHDL-AMS).
• Efficient simulation and emulation of heterogeneous systems. Co-simulation techniques.
• Design and optimization of heterogeneous systems and co-design techniques.
• Case studies and applications include, but are not limited to, networked embedded systems and networked control systems taken from transportation (e.g., automotive), building automation, electricity generation and management, environmental monitoring, biomedical chips, tele-operation and robotics.

For you out there with an interest in smart dust (how to design them, how to simulate them, how to verify them), this could be a good session for you.

Yes – I’m in the review committee …

Script-based mixed-signal IC design course, Scriptic

I am currently wrapping up the outline of the script-based mixed-signal IC design course, scritic, for the Ph.D. students at Linköping University.

Please have a look at:

• http://www.es.isy.liu.se/courses/PhD_courses/scriptic/

where you might find that there are still a few TBDs in the outline.

Any feedback is welcome! Any ideas on scripts that you want to have developed for a typical mixed-signal circuit?

CAD:Just a reminder about Spectre and long simulations

Just a reminder for those who run long simulations in Cadence Spectre, especially the transient ones:

• Set the saveclock option (in seconds) to the time interval at which you want your simulator to save its state.
• Set the savefile option to a file name in which you want to save your state.
• Set the recover option to a file name from which you want to load your state.

So, if you set saveclock to 60, spectre will regularly, every minute save its state to savefile. You can launch the long simulation and press stop and restart as many times as you like. Spectre will restart at the latest minut (clockwise). This is quite handy if there is a power cut or network is dropped.

Notice that the file is overwritten and if you want to save several minutes back, you need to have another script running in parallel saving that data for you. This could also be a handy strategy considering that in the worst case (which is also the most likely case according to Mr. Murphy) you might be writing to disk, just as Spectre or connection dies.

Notice also that you can alter some of the simulator settings. For example the number of nodes saved. This means you can set the simulator to log all nodes first, check them after a while, then stop. Remove some of the probes to save time/disk area, and re-run. Quite handy!