Director, Strategic CAD Labs
Intel Corporation
Hillsboro, Oregon, USA

CAD challenges in a mobility driven era

Traditional computing has served the semiconductor and hardware industry exceedingly well over the past few decades as a driver for Moore's Law scaling.  Electronic computer aided design (CAD) has been instrumental in addressing the design productivity, reliability, and quality challenges arising from  the need to deliver billion-transistor designs to market efficiently. With consumer devices like smartphones, tablets, and ultra-books now emerging as the main drivers for semiconductor industry growth, the electronic design automation research and development community needs to step up to new, exciting challenges driven by the unique form-factor, low-power, and connectivity requirements of these highly mobile consumer devices.  Examples of this are in the areas of embedded software, analog mixed-signal and RF subsystems, software-hardware co-design, power management, and system-level design among others.  In addition to providing motivation for these new challenge areas, this talk will present details for a few specific challenges.

About the Speaker:

Noel Menezes manages Intel's Strategic CAD Labs, which is part of the Design and Technology Solutions division.  In the past, he worked on the first automated interconnect design solution applied to Intel's Pentium 4 family of microprocessors.  His graduate work on clock tree synthesis and the C-effective delay model for static timing analysis has been applied in the CAD suites of several EDA vendors and VLSI design companies. His current research interests are on techniques to analyze and mitigate the impact of variations in design and advanced cell delay models. Noel holds a B.E. degree from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin.