System Verification Blog

The Flash Memory Summit, August 7-9, came just two weeks after MemCon. Given that at least half of the conversations at MemCon were about flash memory, I wondered if anyone would bother to attend a second conference on flash. Well, there were plenty of attendees and exhibitors. My completely unscientific estimate is that the Flash Memory Summit was bigger in all respects than MemCon.

Eli Harari, founder of SanDisk gave the first keynote address on Wednesday morning. SanDisk is betting its future on NAND flash and Eli had numbers to back up his enthusiasm for the technology. Since NAND became chimericaly available in the 1990s, its price per megabyte has declined by a factor of 5,000. By 2012, the cost should be about one-tenth that of DRAM. However, NAND scaling is beginning to outstrip progress in lithography and may reach its limit at the 20 nanometer process node. That point we will be getting 256Gb per chip which may be enough to hold us over for a few days anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

On July 17 & 18 I attended MemCon in Santa Clara. I was able to attend only the first half of the conference due to the pressures of work back in the office. The most frequently discussed topics were NAND Flash and cell phones although a number of other topics rounded out the conference. My reaction to one particular talk can be found on the Different Slants website. If you design products that use memory of any type, you might want to consider attending one of these conferences when they are in your part of the world.

Since my job at Siemens was euthanized last year, I have had time to participate in a variety of workshops and conferences. While having coffee during one of the breaks, it occurred to me how different the people are at different types of events. Read the rest of this entry »

Since you are reading the FMF blog, I will assume you use, or are at least interested in, FMF models. Traditionally, the most difficult aspect of board level simulation has been acquiring the needed models. FMF was created to address that need. We work with component vendors to provide the models you require to verify your board designs. Although we make the models free for you, they are not free for the component vendors. They must expend both money and human resources to support your simulations.

Like any other business, IC companies want to spend money only where they will get a return. If they are convinced that their customers need simulation models and that having models improves sales, then they will do what is necessary to provide models. However, if they do not hear from their customers that models are needed, they will not provide them. Therefore, it is up to you to make sure your IC suppliers know that you need open source simulation models to help you design in their components.

There are two ways to make that need known. You can contact your suppliers directly, and tell them frequently, which of their components you are interested in but lack models. Or, you can use the “Request a Model” form on the FMF website to tell us. If you tell which models you need and from which vendor, we will contact that vendor and explain to them what your needs are and what they can do about it. We will also keep you informed as to our progress.

Either way, it is up to you to make sure your IC vendors understand what you need to get your job done.

For any who do not know John Cooley, he is best described as one of the more colorful characters upon the EDA landscape. He began his “East Coast Synopsys Users Group“ (ESNUG) around 1991 to discuss workarounds to the Synopsys Design Compiler and now has 23,000 subscribers and an EDA website called DeepChip. You can get the full background story from this article by Peggy Aycinena.

John also provides an annual “My Cheesy Must See List for DAC”. This is his unofficial guide to the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and includes important information such as what toys each vendor is giving away, and John’s opinion of their product. For the last several years, this list has included a line stating that Denali has a monopoly on memory models. Read the rest of this entry »

FMF recently had a major IC company contact us to say they wanted to do business with us and have us begin modeling some of their components. We had been trying to sell our services to this company for nine years so I needed to know why they were coming around now. The answer was simple - their customers were asking for FMF models. The nine years of marketing meant nothing to them, it was their customers’ requests they paid attention to. This is as it should be.

Every company that desires to survive and grow needs to listen to its customers. FMF has two classes of customers: the IC companies that pay us; and, their customers who use our models to design-in the IC companies’ parts. You are most likely one of the later.

As an FMF customer, we need your feedback. We need to know what you like and don’t like about our models. How is the accuracy and the performance? How is the ease of use? What can we do to make your board-level verification job easier?

If you will make the effort to give us this feedback, and tell us your expectations, we promise to try to exceed them.