I have historically avoided mixed signal topics, assuming they decouple from digital and can be left to the experts. That simple view no longer holds water. Analog and digital are becoming more closely linked through control loops and datapaths, requiring a careful balancing act in verification between performance, accuracy… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Mixed Signal Verification is Growing in Importance
Fitting GPT into Edge Devices, Why and How
It is tempting to think that everything GPT-related is just chasing the publicity bandwagon and that articles on the topic, especially with evidently impossible claims (as in this case), are simply clickbait. In fact, there are practical reasons for hosting at least a subset of these large language models (LLMs) on edge devices… Read More
Anomaly Detection Through ML. Innovation in Verification
Assertion based verification only catches problems for which you have written assertions. Is there a complementary approach to find problems you haven’t considered – the unknown unknowns? Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now… Read More
Arm Inches Up the Infrastructure Value Chain
Arm just revealed at HotChips their compute subsystems (CSS) direction led by CSS N2. The intent behind CSS is to provide pre-integrated, optimized and validated subsystems to accelerate time to market for infrastructure system builders. Think HPC servers, wireless infrastructure, big edge systems for industry, city, enterprise… Read More
Bluetooth Based Positioning, More Accurate, More Reliable, Safer
Using Bluetooth for positioning is a topic I have touched on before, for location services, keyless entry, and asset tracking among other applications. Earlier implementations depended on measures of received signal strength and angle-of-arrival / angle-of-departure, but these have limited accuracy in environments with… Read More
How Do You Future-Proof Security?
If you are designing electronics to go into a satellite or a military drone, it better have a useful lifetime of 15-20 years or more. Ditto for the grid or other critical infrastructure, your car, medical devices, anything where we demand absolute reliability. Reliability also requires countermeasures against hacking by anyone… Read More
A New Verification Conference Coming to Austin
Actually not so new, just new to us in the US. Verification Futures is already well established as a Tessolve event with a 10-year track record in the UK. This year they are bringing the conference to Austin on September 14th (REGISTER HERE).
While DVCon is an ever-popular event for sharing verification ideas, it isn’t always accessible… Read More
VC Formal Enabled QED Proofs on a RISC-V Core
The Synopsys VC Formal group have a real talent for finding industry speakers to talk on illuminating outside-the-box-topics in formal verification. Not too long ago I covered an Intel talk of this kind. A recent webinar highlighted use of formal methods used together with a cool technique I have covered elsewhere called Quick… Read More
Insights into DevOps Trends in Hardware Design
Periodically I like to check in on the unsung heroes behind the attention-grabbing world of design. I’m speaking of the people responsible for the development and deployment infrastructure on which we all depend – version control, testing, build, release – collectively known these days as DevOps (development operations). … Read More
Qualitative Shift in RISC-V Targets Raises Verification Bar
I had grown comfortable thinking about RISC-V as a cost-saving and more flexible alternative to Intel/AMD or Arm in embedded applications. Where clearly it is already doing very well. But following a discussion with Dave Kelf and Adnan Hamid of Breker, RISC-V goals have become much more ambitious, chasing the same big system applications… Read More
Moving Beyond RTL at #62DAC