Predicting Bugs: ML and Static Team Up. Innovation in Verification

Predicting Bugs: ML and Static Team Up. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 06-11-2020 at 6:00 am

innovation

Can we predict where bugs are most likely to be found, to better direct testing? Paul Cunningham (GM of Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas, again through a paper in software verification we find equally relevant to hardware. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree.

The InnovationRead More


WEBINAR: Adnan on Challenges in Security Verification

WEBINAR: Adnan on Challenges in Security Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 06-09-2020 at 6:00 am

security testing

Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker, has an interesting background. He was born in China to diplomat parents in the Bangladesh embassy. After I’m sure an equally interesting childhood, he got his BSEE/CS at Princeton. Where, like most of us he had to make money on the side, in his case working for a professor in the Psych lab on artificial intelligence… Read More


Arm Reinforces the Mobile Fortress

Arm Reinforces the Mobile Fortress
by Bernard Murphy on 06-02-2020 at 6:00 am

Arm Mobile 2020 Announcement

Arm did it again. They continue to press their advantage, most recently with an announcement on their 2020 release of cores for mobile applications, in Cortex-A, in what they now call Cortex-X custom cores, in Mali GPUs and in the next generation of their Ethos neural net core.

Paul Williamson, VP GM of the client line of business,… Read More


What a Difference an Architecture Makes: Optimizing AI for IoT

What a Difference an Architecture Makes: Optimizing AI for IoT
by Bernard Murphy on 05-28-2020 at 6:00 am

HLS PPA results

Last week Mentor hosted a virtual event on designing an AI accelerator with HLS, integrating it together with an Arm Corstone SSE-200 platform and characterizing/optimizing for performance and power. Though in some ways a recap of earlier presentations, there were some added insights in this session, particularly in characterizing… Read More


Design in the Time of COVID

Design in the Time of COVID
by Bernard Murphy on 05-26-2020 at 6:00 am

Fortune teller

There’s a lot of debate about how and when we are going to emerge from the worldwide economic downturn triggered by the pandemic. Everyone agrees we will emerge. This isn’t humanity’s first pandemic, nor will it be our last. But do we come out quickly or slowly? And what does the economy look like on the other side, particularly for … Read More


Atos Crafts NoC, Pad Ring, More Using Defacto

Atos Crafts NoC, Pad Ring, More Using Defacto
by Bernard Murphy on 05-21-2020 at 6:00 am

Mont Blanc

I’ve talked before about how Defacto provides a platform for scripted RTL assembly. Kind of a rethink of the IP-XACT concept but without need to get into XML (it works directly with SV), and with a more relaxed approach in which you decide what you want to automate and how you want to script it.

They’re hosting a webinar on May 28th 10-11am… Read More


Is Mutation Testing Worth the Effort? Innovation in Verification

Is Mutation Testing Worth the Effort? Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 05-19-2020 at 6:00 am

innovation

Mutation testing is an intriguing idea, but is it useful? Paul Cunningham (GM of Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas, here looking at a paper examining the pros and cons of this topic. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree.

The Innovation

This month’s pick is Which Software Read More


The Problem with Reset Domain Crossings

The Problem with Reset Domain Crossings
by Bernard Murphy on 05-14-2020 at 6:00 am

Reset button

Design complexities in reset, like everything else in big SoC designs, has become incredibly complex, for all sorts of reasons. Long, long ago reset was something you just did once, when you turned the power on. Turn on, then hold reset for some amount of time until everything is in a known starting state, and off you go. Nice and simple.… Read More


3 Steps to a Security Plan

3 Steps to a Security Plan
by Bernard Murphy on 05-12-2020 at 12:00 am

cybersecurity

Assessing the security of a hardware design sometimes seems like a combination of the guy looking under a streetlight for his car keys, because that’s where the light is (We have this tool, let’s see what problems it can find) and a whack-a-mole response to the latest publicized vulnerabilities (Cache timing side channels? What… Read More


Ultra-Low Power Inference at the Extreme Edge

Ultra-Low Power Inference at the Extreme Edge
by Bernard Murphy on 05-07-2020 at 6:00 am

Intelligent IoT

I wrote last year about Eta Compute and their continuously tuned dynamic voltage-frequency scaling (CVFS). That piece was mostly about the how and why of the technology, that in self-timed circuits (a core technology for Eta Compute) it is possible to continuously vary voltage and frequency, whereas in conventional synchronous… Read More