Back to Basics – Designing Out PPA Risk

Back to Basics – Designing Out PPA Risk
by Bernard Murphy on 07-19-2023 at 6:00 am

balancing rocks

I wrote earlier about managing service-level risk in SoC design, since the minimum service level a system can guarantee under realistic traffic is critical to OEM guarantees of dependable system performance. An ABS design which might get bogged down in traffic under only 0.1% of scenarios is of no use to anyone. That said, meeting… Read More


Sondrel Extends ASIC Turnkey Design to Supply Services From Europe to US

Sondrel Extends ASIC Turnkey Design to Supply Services From Europe to US
by Bernard Murphy on 07-12-2023 at 6:00 am

Sondrel scaling

It’s no secret that system companies are driving a lot of new silicon. Google, AWS, Tesla and others have well-established design teams delivering differentiated servers, AI engines and other technologies. I’m sure NVIDIA suspects sub rosa projects are already underway in many of these hyperscalers to design out their GPUs.… Read More


Vision Transformers Challenge Accelerator Architectures

Vision Transformers Challenge Accelerator Architectures
by Bernard Murphy on 07-05-2023 at 6:00 am

vision transformer

For what seems like a long time in the fast-moving world of AI, CNNs and their relatives have driven AI engine architectures at the edge. While the nature of neural net algorithms has evolved significantly, they are all assumed to be efficiently handled on a heterogenous platform processing through the layers of a DNN: an NPU for … Read More


Better Randomizing Constrained Random. Innovation in Verification

Better Randomizing Constrained Random. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 06-28-2023 at 10:00 am

Innovation New

Constrained random methods in simulation are universally popular, still can the method be improved? Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.… Read More


Managing Service Level Risk in SoC Design

Managing Service Level Risk in SoC Design
by Bernard Murphy on 06-21-2023 at 6:00 am

Traffic

Discussion on design metrics tends to revolve around power, performance, safety, and security. All of these are important, but there is an additional performance objective a product must meet defined by a minimum service level agreement (SLA). A printer display may work fine most of the time yet will intermittently corrupt the… Read More


Democratizing the Ultimate Audio Experience

Democratizing the Ultimate Audio Experience
by Bernard Murphy on 06-08-2023 at 6:00 am

3D Audio

I enjoy talking with CEVA because they work on such interesting consumer products (among other product lines). My most recent discussion was with Seth Sternberg (Sensors and Audio software at CEVA), on spatial or 3D audio. The first steps to a somewhat immersive audio experience were stereo and surround sound, placing sound sources… Read More


Arm 2023 Mobile Solutions Continue Gaming Focus

Arm 2023 Mobile Solutions Continue Gaming Focus
by Bernard Murphy on 06-06-2023 at 6:00 am

TCS23

Arm recently announced an update for mobile under the Arm Total Compute Solutions (TCS) label, led by Chris Bergey (Sr. VP/GM for the Client line of business). You’ll remember that Chris headed the infrastructure line of business impressively through the Neoverse brand, as demonstrated by Arm-based servers appearing in multiple… Read More


Deep Learning for Fault Localization. Innovation in Verification

Deep Learning for Fault Localization. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 05-30-2023 at 6:00 am

Innovation New

A new look at fault localization and repair in debug using learning based on deep semantic features. Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.

The

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A Negative Problem for Large Language Models

A Negative Problem for Large Language Models
by Bernard Murphy on 05-23-2023 at 6:00 am

Picture1

I recently read a thought-provoking article in Quanta titled Chatbots Don’t Know What Stuff Isn’t. The point of the article is that while large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Bard and their brethren are impressively capable, they stumble on negation. An example offered in the article suggests that while a prompt, “Is it true… Read More


An SDK for an Advanced AI Engine

An SDK for an Advanced AI Engine
by Bernard Murphy on 05-22-2023 at 6:00 am

Chimera SDK

I have observed before that the success of an AI engine at the edge rests heavily on the software interface to drive that technology. Networks trained in the cloud need considerable massaging to optimize for smaller and more specialized edge devices. Moreover, an AI task at the edge depends on a standalone pipeline demanding a mix… Read More