Wrapping up the MICROROM
By Lynn Reed

There were two different types of sense amps. Inverting and non-inverting. It took me a moment to realize why. One of the things that limit speed is the rise time of the bit lines. And the rise...

LVS Text Layer
By Lynn Reed

The layout has about 20K texted nodes, and about 8K are unique.  I made the decision to use these named nodes as LVS text in our design flow.  So I selected the text, and mapped it to LVS text layers...

Repeat After Me
By Lynn Reed

I came across a really obscure UART failure mechanism. I'm not going to call it a bug, but it frequently causes problems. And while everyone else may know about it, I sure was unaware..

Execunit
By Lynn Reed

Because we don't actually have an order for this project yet, I am going to work on it on a part-time basis.  My intent is to pick pieces of the design, and extract the netlist.  This will provide..

Data Bus Pin
By Lynn Reed

I chose a data bus pin as my next cell. At least I know what it is supposed to do. Each pin consists of output transistors, and the drivers for those transistors. The output buffers use N-channel pullups..

Address Pins
By Lynn Reed

I started working on the address pins today.  I selected them all, and noticed that there were a lot of difference cells involved.  That is not a particularly good sign, since that could mean a...

Clean LVS Run
By Lynn Reed

Because this project is not yet funded, I can only work on it nights and weekends.  And since I had to stay around the house last weekend, it was a perfect time to work on it.  I do think that..

Netlist
By Lynn Reed

Here is the strategy that I am going to use to extract the netlist.  First I have to understand the layout.  Then I will write a technology table to allow me to run LVS on it.  The LVS run will allow me to.....

Spice to Verilog
By Lynn Reed

It is a combination of new software, a surgery, and 4 solid days of customer visits and quality audits.  When I left this, I had all but the bottom two address pins through LVS.  I am putting.....

GDS Data Base
By Lynn Reed

We now have the GDS data base.  The first step is to determine which layers are which.  A Freescale engineer provided an old document (though newer than the data base) which gave the.....

68020 Microprocessor
By Lynn Reed

As part of the Tekmos – Freescale Technology exchange, we received the manufacturing rights to the 68020 microprocessor.  This processor is a full 32 bit processor, and was the equivalent to..

Its Alive
By Lynn Reed

This project still hasn't been funded, and so I can only work on it in my spare time.  And lately I have been working on a similar PowerPC project.  But today was different.  We lost our phones..

How to “Excel” at ROM Data Extraction
By Lynn Reed

I have isolated what Freescale called the MICROROM, though I don't know why it is called that. We had earlier found a test article that talked about it, but I haven't read it yet.  This ROM is.....