Accellera Tackles Functional Safety, Mixed-Signal

Accellera Tackles Functional Safety, Mixed-Signal
by Bernard Murphy on 05-05-2020 at 6:00 am

Accellera

I managed a few meetings at DVCon this year in spite of the Coronavirus problems. One of these was with Lu Dai Chairman of Accellera. I generally meet with Lu each year to get an update on where they are headed, and he had some interesting new topics to share.

Membership and headcount remain pretty stable. Any changes (at the associate… Read More


Radiation Tolerance. Not Just for ISO 26262

Radiation Tolerance. Not Just for ISO 26262
by Bernard Murphy on 04-30-2020 at 6:00 am

Satellite

Years before ISO 26262 (the auto safety standard) existed, a few electronics engineers had to worry about radiation hardening, but not for cars. Their concerns were the same we have today – radiation-induced single event effects (SEE) and single event upsets (SEU). SEEs are root-cause effects – some form of radiation, might be… Read More


AI, Safety and Low Power, Compounding Complexity

AI, Safety and Low Power, Compounding Complexity
by Bernard Murphy on 04-28-2020 at 6:00 am

Hoc in a low-power ASIL-D design

The nexus of complexity in SoC design these days has to be in automotive ADAS devices. Arteris IP highlighted this in the Linley Processor Conference recently where they talked about an ADAS chip that Toshiba had built. This has multiple vision and AI accelerators, both DSP and DNN-based. It is clearly aiming for ISO 26262 ASIL D … Read More


Wi-Fi Bulks Up

Wi-Fi Bulks Up
by Bernard Murphy on 04-23-2020 at 6:00 am

Wi Fi

Wireless discussion these days seems to be dominated by 5G, but that’s not the only standard that’s attracting attention. The FCC just circulated draft rules to dramatically expand bandwidth available to Wi-Fi in the new Wi-Fi 6e standard.

Is this a tragic plea for attention from a once-important standard, now eclipsed by its … Read More


That Last Level Cache is Pretty Important

That Last Level Cache is Pretty Important
by Bernard Murphy on 04-21-2020 at 6:00 am

CodaCache in System

Last-level cache seemed to me like one of those, yeah I get it, but sort of obscure technical corners that only uber-geek cache specialists would care about. Then I stumbled on an AnandTech review on the iPhone 11 Pro and Max and started to understand that this contributes to more than just engineering satisfaction.

Caching

A brief… Read More


Breker Tips a Hat to Formal Graphs in PSS Security Verification

Breker Tips a Hat to Formal Graphs in PSS Security Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 04-16-2020 at 6:00 am

Breker security tables

It might seem paradoxical that simulation (or equivalent dynamic methods) might be one of the best ways to run security checks. Checking security is a problem where you need to find rare corners that a hacker might exploit. In dynamic verification, no matter how much we test we know we’re not going to cover all corners, so how can it… Read More


Innovation in Verification April 2020

Innovation in Verification April 2020
by Bernard Murphy on 04-14-2020 at 6:00 am

Innovation

This blog is the next in a series in which Paul Cunningham (GM of the Verification Group at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I pick a paper on a novel idea we appreciated and suggest opportunities to further build on that idea.

We’re getting a lot of hits on these blogs but would like really like to get feedback also.

The Innovation

Our next pick… Read More


Best Practices for IP Reuse

Best Practices for IP Reuse
by Bernard Murphy on 04-08-2020 at 6:00 am

Reuse

As someone who was heavily involved with rules for IP reuse for many years, I have a major sense of déja vu in writing again on the topic. But we (in SpyGlass) were primarily invested in atomic-level checks in RTL and gate-level designs. There’s a higher level of best practices in process we didn’t attempt to cover. ClioSoft just released… Read More


What’s New in CDC Analysis?

What’s New in CDC Analysis?
by Bernard Murphy on 04-06-2020 at 6:00 am

Validating assumptions in CDC constraints

Synopsys just released a white paper, a backgrounder on CDC. You’ve read enough of what I’ve written on this topic that I don’t need to re-tread that path. However, this is tech so there’s always something new to talk about. This time I’ll cover a Synopsys survey update on numbers of clock domains in designs, also an update on ways to… Read More


Private Datacenter Safer than the Cloud? Dangerously Wrong.

Private Datacenter Safer than the Cloud? Dangerously Wrong.
by Bernard Murphy on 04-02-2020 at 6:00 am

Cloud Security

The irony around this topic in the middle of the coronavirus scare – when more of us are working remotely through the cloud – is not lost on me. Nevertheless, ingrained beliefs move slowly so it’s still worth shedding further light. There is a tribal wisdom among chip designers that what we do demands much higher security than any other… Read More