Synopsys hosted a tutorial on the last day of DVCon USA 2022 on design/system dependability. Which here they interpret as security, functional safety, and reliability analysis. The tutorial included talks from DARPA, AMD, Arm Research and Synopsys. DARPA and AMD talked about general directions and needs, Arm talked about their… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Symbolic Trojan Detection. Innovation in Verification
We normally test only for correctness of the functionality we expect. How can we find functionality (e.g. Trojans) that we don’t expect? Paul Cunningham (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,… Read More
Experimenting for Better Floorplans
There is sometimes an irony in switching to a better solution in design construction or analysis. The new approach is so much better that you want to experiment to further optimize the design. Which then exposes another barrier to enjoying that newfound freedom. SoC design teams often find this when switching from crossbar interconnect… Read More
Siemens EDA on the Best Verification Strategy
Harry Foster opened and wrapped a tutorial at DVCon 2022 on “The Best Verification Strategy You’ve Never Heard Of”. Harry started with a common refrain on verification; we face a crisis thanks to a combination of growing complexity in the systems we are able to design, yet double exponential growth in verification cost for… Read More
Getting to Faster Closure through AI/ML, DVCon Keynote
Manish Pandey, VP R&D and Fellow at Synopsys, gave the keynote this year. His thesis is that given the relentless growth of system complexity, now amplified by multi-chiplet systems, we must move the verification efficiency needle significantly. In this world we need more than incremental advances in performance. We need… Read More
An Ah-Ha Moment for Testbench Assembly
Sometimes we miss the forest for the trees, and I’m as guilty as anyone else. When we think testbenches, we rightly turn to UVM because that’s the agreed standard, and everyone has been investing their energy in learning UVM. UVM is fine, so why do we need to talk about anything different? That’s the forest and trees thing. We don’t … Read More
Power Analysis in Advanced SoCs. A Siemens EDA Perspective
The success of modern battery-powered products depends as much on useful operating time between charges as on functionality. FinFET process technologies overtook earlier planar CMOS in part because they significantly reduce leakage power. But they exacerbate dynamic power consumption thanks to increased pin capacitances.… Read More
Dynamic Coherence Verification. Innovation in Verification
We know about formal methods for cache coherence state machines. What sorts of tests are possible using dynamic coherence verification? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.… Read More
Verific Sharpening the Saw
Verific is an unusual company. They are completely dominant in what they do – providing parsers for Verilog/SV, VHDL and UPF. Yet they have no ambition to expand beyond that goal. Instead, per Michiel Ligthart (President and COO), they continue to “sharpen the saw”. This is an expression I learned in sales training, habit #7 from… Read More
Breker Attacks System Coherency Verification
The great thing about architectural solutions to increasing throughput is that they offer big improvements. Multiple CPUs on a chip with (partially) shared cache hierarchies are now commonplace in server processors for this reason. But that big gain comes with significant added complexity in verifying correct behavior. In… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay