Design Features: June 8, 1995

Cover Story
Submicron EDA tools help tackle tough designs	With rapidly growing digital-chip complexity, your need to change design methods becomes critical. You can begin this task by creating an effective methodology that integrates system conception and partitioning, physical layout, power considerations, and signal integrity. --Jim Lipman, Technical Editor
Design Features The hottest new technologies and the latest design techniques to help you work efficiently and effectively.
Deep-submicron geometries dictate new approaches to ASIC design	The ever-shrinking geometries of deep-submicron ASICs can cause interconnect delays, nonlinearities, and physics to dominate a design. Success in designing these devices means designers must work closely with ASIC vendors and EDA-tool makers. -- John Gallant, Technical Editor
ICs and reference designs speed PC Card development	Designing PC Cards (formerly known as PCMCIA cards) isn't as hard as you might think. Help is available from special PCMCIA ICs and from tried-and-proven reference designs. If you decide to forego these aids and design from scratch, you'll have a lot of learning to do. -- Gary Legg, Executive Editor
Plug-and-play VXI helps ATE users	Plug-and-play architectures are not just for PCs. The test world is hard at work on a plug-and-play architecture of its own-for the VXI modular-instrumentation bus. As vendors deliver VXI plug-and-play, test engineers can focus on their real job-testing products-instead of on getting the test equipment to work -- NS Manju Nath, Technical Editor
To use BSDL successfully, validate device descriptions carefully	IEEE-1149.1 boundary scan can greatly help test developers, but the consequences of inaccurate device descriptions are serious. Although BSDL provides a standard way of describing devices, you can't escape the need to thoroughly validate your BSDL files. -- Jeff Sherman, Texas Instruments
Prototyping beats simulation for complex, real-time designs	To prototype or simultate? Advances in programmable logic and increasing system complexity make prototyping worth scrutinizing. -- Leo Petropoulos, Altera Corp
Design your way through the maze of European telephone-company regulations	Without the proper approval from a target country, you cannot connect analog TTE to that country's PSTN. Because European specifications vary widely, early planning for approval is essential to avoiding a patchwork design -- Joseph M Dwyer, Inter-Tel