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
Author: Bernard Murphy
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
Business Considerations in Traceability
Traceability as an emerging debate around hardware is gaining a lot of traction. As a reminder, traceability is the need to support a disciplined ability to trace from initial OEM requirements down through the value chain to implementation support and confirmed verification in software and hardware. Demand for traceability… Read More
2021 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification
As we established last year, we will use the January issue of this blog to look back at the papers we reviewed last year. We lost Jim Hogan and the benefit of his insight early last year, but we gained a new and also well-known expert in Raúl Camposano (another friend of Jim). Paul (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl (Silicon Catalyst,… Read More
AI at the Edge No Longer Means Dumbed-Down AI
One aspect of received wisdom on AI has been that all the innovation starts in the big machine learning/training engines in the cloud. Some of that innovation might eventually migrate in a reduced/ limited form to the edge. In part this reflected the newness of the field. Perhaps also in part it reflected need for prepackaged one-size-fits-many… Read More
Scalable Concolic Testing. Innovation in Verification
Combining simulation and symbolic methods is an attractive way to excite rare branches in block-level verification, but is this method really scalable? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always,… Read More
Topics for Innovation in Verification
Paul, Raúl and I are having fun with our Innovation in Verification series, and you seem to be also, judging by the hit rates we’re getting. We track these carefully to judge what you find most interesting and what seems to fall more under the category of “Meh”. Paul and others also get informal feedback in client meetings but it would… Read More
Ramping Up Software Ideas for Hardware Design
This is a topic in which I have a lot of interest, covered in a panel at this year’s DAC; Raúl Camposano chaired the session. I had earlier covered a keynote by Moshe Zalcberg at Europe DVCon late in 2020; he now reprises the topic. Given the incredible pace of innovation and scale in software development these days, I don’t see what we… Read More









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