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Engineering Change Notice
An engineering change order (ECO), also called an engineering change notice (ECN), engineering change (EC), or engineering release notice(ERN), is an artifact used to implement changes to components or end products. The ECO is utilized to control and coordinate changes to product designs that evolve over time. The need for an engineering change may be triggered by a number of events and varies by industry. Typical engineering change categories are: * Product Evolution - a change resulting in applying an existing part to a new application and maintaining backwards compatibility * Cost Reduction - a change resulting in lower overall cost to produce or maintain * Product Performance - a change that improves the capabilities of the item * Safety - a change required to enhance the safety to those using or interacting with the item Usage and contents An ECO is defined as " document approved by the design activity that describes and authorizes the implementation of an engineering ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ASIC
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency video codec. Application-specific standard product (ASSP) chips are intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits like the 7400 series or the 4000 series. ASIC chips are typically fabricated using metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) technology, as MOS integrated circuit chips. As feature sizes have shrunk and design tools improved over the years, the maximum complexity (and hence functionality) possible in an ASIC has grown from 5,000 logic gates to over 100 million. Modern ASICs often include entire microprocessors, memory blocks including ROM, RAM, EEPROM, flash memory and other large building blocks. Such an ASIC is often termed a SoC (system-on-chip). Designers of digital ASICs often use a hardware description ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logic Synthesis
In computer engineering, logic synthesis is a process by which an abstract specification of desired circuit behavior, typically at register transfer level (RTL), is turned into a design implementation in terms of logic gates, typically by a computer program called a ''synthesis tool''. Common examples of this process include synthesis of designs specified in hardware description languages, including VHDL and Verilog. Some synthesis tools generate bitstreams for programmable logic devices such as PALs or FPGAs, while others target the creation of ASICs. Logic synthesis is one aspect of electronic design automation. History of logic synthesis The roots of logic synthesis can be traced to the treatment of logic by George Boole (1815 to 1864), in what is now termed Boolean algebra. In 1938, Claude Shannon showed that the two-valued Boolean algebra can describe the operation of switching circuits. In the early days, logic design involved manipulating the truth table representation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Placement (EDA)
Placement is an essential step in electronic design automation — the portion of the physical design flow that assigns exact locations for various circuit components within the chip's core area. An inferior placement assignment will not only affect the chip's performance but might also make it non-manufacturable by producing excessive wire-length, which is beyond available routing resources. Consequently, a placer must perform the assignment while optimizing a number of objectives to ensure that a circuit meets its performance demands. Together, the placement and routing steps of IC design are known as place and route. A placer takes a given synthesized circuit netlist together with a technology library and produces a valid placement layout. The layout is optimized according to the aforementioned objectives and ready for cell resizing and buffering — a step essential for timing and signal integrity satisfaction. Clock-tree synthesis and Routing follow, completing the physical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Routing (EDA)
In electronic design, wire routing, commonly called simply routing, is a step in the design of printed circuit boards (PCBs) and integrated circuits (ICs). It builds on a preceding step, called placement, which determines the location of each active element of an IC or component on a PCB. After placement, the routing step adds wires needed to properly connect the placed components while obeying all design rules for the IC. Together, the placement and routing steps of IC design are known as place and route. The task of all routers is the same. They are given some pre-existing polygons consisting of pins (also called terminals) on cells, and optionally some pre-existing wiring called preroutes. Each of these polygons are associated with a net, usually by name or number. The primary task of the router is to create geometries such that all terminals assigned to the same net are connected, no terminals assigned to different nets are connected, and all design rules are obeyed. A rou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Layout Extraction
The electric circuit extraction or simply circuit extraction, also netlist extraction, is the translation of an integrated circuit layout back into the electrical circuit (netlist) it is intended to represent. This extracted circuit is needed for various purposes including circuit simulation Electronic circuit simulation uses mathematical models to replicate the behavior of an actual electronic device or circuit. Simulation software allows for modeling of circuit operation and is an invaluable analysis tool. Due to its highly accurat ..., static timing analysis, signal integrity, power analysis and optimization, and logic to layout comparison. Each of these functions require a slightly different representation of the circuit, resulting in the need for multiple layout extractions. In addition, there may be a postprocessing step of converting the device-level circuit into a purely digital circuit, but this is not considered part of the extraction process. The detailed func ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Static Timing Analysis
Static timing analysis (STA) is a simulation method of computing the expected timing of a Synchronous circuit, synchronous digital circuit without requiring a simulation of the full circuit. High-performance integrated circuits have traditionally been characterized by the clock frequency at which they operate. Measuring the ability of a circuit to operate at the specified speed requires an ability to measure, during the design process, its delay at numerous steps. Moreover, delay calculation must be incorporated into the inner loop of timing optimizers at various phases of design, such as logic synthesis, layout (Placement (EDA), placement and Routing (EDA), routing), and in in-place optimizations performed late in the design cycle. While such timing measurements can theoretically be performed using a rigorous SPICE, circuit simulation, such an approach is liable to be too slow to be practical. Static timing analysis plays a vital role in facilitating the fast and reasonably ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Photomask
A photomask is an opaque plate with holes or transparencies that allow light to shine through in a defined pattern. They are commonly used in photolithography and the production of integrated circuits (ICs or "chips") in particular. Masks are used to produce a pattern on a substrate, normally a thin slice of silicon known as a wafer in the case of chip manufacturing. Several masks are used in turn, each one reproducing a layer of the completed design, and together they are known as a mask set. Previously, photomasks used to be produced manually by using rubylith and mylar. As complexity continued to grow, manual processing of any sort became difficult. This was solved with the introduction of the optical pattern generator which automated the process of producing the initial large-scale pattern, and the step-and-repeat cameras that automated the copying of the pattern into a multiple-IC mask. The intermediate masks are known as reticles, and were initially copied to production mas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiconductor Fabrication
Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) chips such as modern computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are present in everyday electrical and electronic devices. It is a multiple-step sequence of photolithographic and chemical processing steps (such as surface passivation, thermal oxidation, planar diffusion and junction isolation) during which electronic circuits are gradually created on a wafer made of pure semiconducting material. Silicon is almost always used, but various compound semiconductors are used for specialized applications. The entire manufacturing process takes time, from start to packaged chips ready for shipment, at least six to eight weeks (tape-out only, not including the circuit design) and is performed in highly specialized semiconductor fabrication plants, also called foundries or fabs. All fabrication takes place inside a c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formal Equivalence Checking
Formal equivalence checking process is a part of electronic design automation (EDA), commonly used during the development of digital integrated circuits, to formally prove that two representations of a circuit design exhibit exactly the same behavior. Equivalence checking and levels of abstraction In general, there is a wide range of possible definitions of functional equivalence covering comparisons between different levels of abstraction and varying granularity of timing details. *The most common approach is to consider the problem of machine equivalence which defines two synchronous design specifications functionally equivalent if, clock by clock, they produce ''exactly'' the same sequence of output signals for ''any'' valid sequence of input signals. *Microprocessor designers use equivalence checking to compare the functions specified for the instruction set architecture (ISA) with a register transfer level (RTL) implementation, ensuring that any program executed on both ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time-to-market
In commerce, time to market (TTM) is the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. The reason that time to market is so important is since being late erodes the addressable market into which producers have to sell their product. A common assumption is that TTM matters most for first-of-a-kind products, but actually a late product launch in any industry can negatively impact revenues—from reducing the window of opportunity to generate revenues to causing the product to become obsolete faster. Measuring TTM There are no standards for measuring TTM, and measured values can vary greatly. First, there is great variation in how different organizations define the start of the period. For example, in the automotive industry the development period starts when the product concept is approved. Other organizations realize that little will happen until the project is staffed, which can take a long time after approval if developers are tied ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiconductor Industry
The semiconductor industry is the aggregate of companies engaged in the design and fabrication of semiconductors and semiconductor devices, such as transistors and integrated circuits. It formed around 1960, once the fabrication of semiconductor devices became a viable business. The industry's annual semiconductor sales revenue has since grown to over , as of 2018. The semiconductor industry is in turn the driving force behind the wider electronics industry, with annual power electronics sales of £135billion () as of 2011, annual consumer electronics sales expected to reach by 2020, tech industry sales expected to reach in 2019, and e-commerce with over in 2017. In 2019, 32.4% of the semiconductor market segment was for networks and communications devices. In 2021, the sales of semiconductors reached a record $555.9 billion, up 26.2 percent with sales in China reaching $192.5 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. A record 1.15 trillion semiconduct ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electronic Design Automation
Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools work together in a Design flow (EDA), 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). History Early days Prior to the development of EDA, integrated circuits were designed by hand and manually laid out. Some advanced shops used geometric software to generate tapes for a Gerber format, Gerber photoplotter, responsible for generating a monochromatic exposure image, but even those copied digital recordings of mechanically drawn components. The process was fundamentally graphic, with the translation f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
