The Siemens U2U event takes place in the US (Santa Clara, CA), and here in Munich, Germany. We couldn’t resist the opportunity to be part of an event on our doorstep where we could learn, share and network with fellow technical experts who design leading-edge products using Siemens EDA tools.
In particular, the well-attended and in-depth user-focused event turned out to be a fantastic opportunity for the Thalia team to really get ‘under the hood’, to understand how things work with the entire Siemens EDA flow and, in particular, how to integrate the Tanner EDA and AFS Simulator into Thalia’s AMALIA solution.
Siemens EDA, then Mentor Graphics, acquired Tanner EDA back in 2015 and the powerful analog-mixed signal tools are now thoroughly integrated as part of the Siemens EDA toolflow. Some of Thalia’s customers utilize the AFS (Analog Fast SPICE) Simulator so in-depth discussions with Siemens engineers and some of the Tanner EDA specialists enabled us to really do some deep-dive discussions which will educate our own customer engagements.
The event also gave the team an opportunity to directly engage with some of our potential customers, to explore how IP reuse using the Thalia AMALIA platform, could help their migration strategies and help them to both accelerate time to market and drive down costs of porting to more cost-effective nodes or manufacturing options.
It was interesting to see what Tanner EDA team presented on an XFAB case study, demonstrating how easy the Tanner custom IC design tools from Siemens are to use and to integrate with best-in-class circuit simulators, Calibre for design rule checking, parasitic extraction and physical verification.
In terms of what opportunities lie ahead for AMALIA and our IP reuse platform, it was really interesting listening to Joe Sawicki, EVP at Siemens EDA in his session ‘From IC to Systems: New Opportunities for the Semiconductor Industries’ which focused on supporting technology scaling which is driven by increasing system complexity and migrating to new nodes but with it comes an escalating cost to create new SoCs of unprecedented size and functionality on accelerated schedules.
Future Horizons CEO Malcolm Penn pondered how the semiconductor industry will continue to perform and how it can be accurately forecast in the face of the death of Moore’s Law.
Overall, an excellent event, and a great deal of knowledge and insight taken away for our own thinking. With thanks to Siemens for putting on this conference.
