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
Author: Bernard Murphy
Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited
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?
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
Predicting Bugs: ML and Static Team Up. Innovation in Verification
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 Innovation… Read More
WEBINAR: Adnan on Challenges in Security Verification
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 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
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
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
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
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
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?