Low Power and RISC-V Talks at DAC2020, Hosted by Mentor

Low Power and RISC-V Talks at DAC2020, Hosted by Mentor
by Bernard Murphy on 07-28-2020 at 6:00 am

low battery

I’m going to get to low power and RISC-V, but first I’m trying out virtual DAC this year. Seems to be working smoothly, aside from some glitches in registration. But maybe that’s just me – I switched email addresses in the middle of the process. Some sessions are live, many pre-recorded, not quite the same interactive experience… Read More


Quantifying the Benefits of AI in Edge Computing

Quantifying the Benefits of AI in Edge Computing
by Bernard Murphy on 07-21-2020 at 6:00 am

Architectures for Edge computing

Many of us are now somewhat fluent in IoT-speak, though at times I have to wonder if I’m really up on the latest terminology. Between edge and extreme edge, fog and cloud, not to mention emerging hierarchies in radio access networks – how this all plays out is going to be an interesting game to watch. Ron Lowman, DesignWare IP Product… Read More


Using AI to Locate a Fault. Innovation in Verification

Using AI to Locate a Fault. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 07-16-2020 at 10:00 am

innovation in verification

After we detect a bug, can we use AI to locate the fault, or at least get close? Paul Cunningham (GM of Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas, through a paper in software verification we find equally relevant to hardware. Feel free to comment.

 

The Innovation
This month’s pick is… Read More


Hierarchical CDC analysis is possible, with the right tools

Hierarchical CDC analysis is possible, with the right tools
by Bernard Murphy on 07-14-2020 at 6:00 am

Design complexity demands hierarchical CDC

Back in my Atrenta days (before mid-2015), we were already running into a lot of very large SoC-level designs – a billion gates or more. At those sizes, full-chip verification of any kind becomes extremely challenging. Memory demand and run-times explode, and verification costs explode also since these runs require access to … Read More


Sensors, AI, Tiny Power in a Turnkey Board.

Sensors, AI, Tiny Power in a Turnkey Board.
by Bernard Murphy on 07-10-2020 at 6:00 am

Eta Compute ECM3532 AI Sensor Board Top

Got a great idea for a device with AI at the extreme edge? Self-contained and can run on a coin cell battery, maybe even harvested energy? Needs to fit in a space not much larger than a quarter? Eta Compute has a board for you. This comes with 2 MEMS microphones, a pressure/temperature sensor, a 6-axis MEMS accelerometer/gyroscope,… Read More


Arm Rings the Bell in Supercomputing

Arm Rings the Bell in Supercomputing
by Bernard Murphy on 07-08-2020 at 6:00 am

Fugaku

Late last year I wrote about Arm’s efforts to play a role in servers, in AWS, and particularly Arm-based supercomputing, in the Sandia Astra roadmap and in partnering with NVIDIA who are in the Oak Ridge Summit supercomputer. These steps came, at least for me, with an implicit “Good for them, playing a role on the edges of these challenging… Read More


What’s New in Verdi? Faster Debug

What’s New in Verdi? Faster Debug
by Bernard Murphy on 07-02-2020 at 6:00 am

Verdi Unified Debug

Want fast debug? Synopsys recently hosted a Webinar to show off the latest and greatest improvements to Verdi® in performance, memory demand and multi-tasking, among other areas.

Performance improvements
Taruna Reddy (PMM) and Allen Hsieh (Staff apps) presented features of the latest version, released in March – Taruna started… Read More


Qualcomm on Power Estimation, Optimizing for Gaming on Mobile GPUs

Qualcomm on Power Estimation, Optimizing for Gaming on Mobile GPUs
by Bernard Murphy on 06-30-2020 at 6:00 am

Phone game

I don’t look at the RTL power estimation topic too often these days, so I was interested to see that ANSYS still has a very strong position in this area. Qualcomm is using PowerArtist on one of the most demanding modern applications – mobile GPU power gaming. Mobile gaming heavily loads the GPU, so any optimization in that area will … Read More


Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited

Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited
by Bernard Murphy on 06-24-2020 at 6:00 am

frame interpolation

I believe I asked this question a year or two ago and answered it for the absolute bleeding edge of datacenter performance – Google TPU and the like. Those hyperscalars (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, etc) who want to do on-the-fly recognition in pictures so they can tag friends in photos, do almost real-time machine… Read More


Where’s the Value in Next-Gen Cars?

Where’s the Value in Next-Gen Cars?
by Bernard Murphy on 06-17-2020 at 6:00 am

money

Value chains can be very robust and seemingly unbreakable – until they’re not. One we’ve taken for granted for many years is the chain for electronics systems in cars. The auto OEM, e.g. Toyota, gets electronics module from a Tier-1 supplier such as Denso. They, in turn, build their modules using chips from a semiconductor chip maker… Read More