Accelerating Functional Safety Verification

Accelerating Functional Safety Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 10-24-2019 at 6:00 am

FuSa Verification

Verifying a design for functional safety requirements for an IP or SoC per ISO 26262 is a complex process that can’t be encapsulated in one tool. Process complexities depend on whether the Tier1 or OEM is targeting safety-levels ASIL-A , B, C or D, where ASIL-D applies to anything truly safety-critical such as airbag controls or … Read More


Safety and Platform-Based Design

Safety and Platform-Based Design
by Bernard Murphy on 10-22-2019 at 5:00 am

Safety infrastructure in platform design

I was at Arm TechCon as usual this year and one of the first panels I covered was close to the kickoff, hosted by Andrew Hopkins (Dir System Technology at Arm), Kurt Shuler (VP marketing at Arteris IP) and Jens Benndorf (Managing Dir and COO at Dream Chip Technologies). The topic was implementing ISO 26262-compliant AI SoCs with Arm… Read More


Virtualizing 5G Infrastructure Verification

Virtualizing 5G Infrastructure Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 10-17-2019 at 5:00 am

5G backhaul, midhaul, fronthaul

Mentor have pushed the advantages of virtualized verification in a number of domains, initially in verifying advanced networking devices supporting multiple protocols and software-defined networking (SDN), and more recently for SSD controllers, particularly in large storage systems for data centers. There are two important… Read More


Formal in the Field: Users are Getting More Sophisticated

Formal in the Field: Users are Getting More Sophisticated
by Bernard Murphy on 10-15-2019 at 5:00 am

Formal SIG 2019 meeting at Synopsys

Building on an old chestnut, if sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic, there are a number of technology users who are increasingly looking like magicians. Of course when it comes to formal, neither is magical, just very clever. The technology continues to advance and so do the users in their application of those methods.… Read More


Accellera IP Security Standard: A Start

Accellera IP Security Standard: A Start
by Bernard Murphy on 10-10-2019 at 5:00 am

IPSA Workflow

I mentioned some time ago (a DVCon or two ago) that Accellera had started working on a standard to quantify IP security. At the time I talked about some of the challenges in the task but nevertheless applauded the effort. You’ve got to start somewhere and some way to quantify this is better than none, as long as it doesn’t deliver misleading… Read More


Design Perspectives on Intermittent Faults

Design Perspectives on Intermittent Faults
by Bernard Murphy on 10-08-2019 at 5:00 am

Faults

Bugs are an inescapable reality in any but the most trivial designs and usually trace back to very deterministic causes – a misunderstanding of the intended spec or an incompletely thought-through implementation of some feature, either way leading to reliably reproducible failure under the right circumstances. You run diagnostics,… Read More


Acceleration in a Heterogenous Compute Environment

Acceleration in a Heterogenous Compute Environment
by Bernard Murphy on 10-02-2019 at 5:00 am

Acceleration

Heterogenous compute isn’t a new concept. We’ve had it in phones and datacenters for quite a while – CPUs complemented by GPUs, DSPs and perhaps other specialized processors. But each of these compute engines has a very specific role, each driven by its own software (or training in the case of AI accelerators). You write software… Read More


Webinar: Finding Your Way Through Formal Verification

Webinar: Finding Your Way Through Formal Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 10-01-2019 at 6:00 am

Finding your way through formal book

Formal verification has always appeared daunting to me and I suspect to many other people also. Logic simulation feels like a “roll your sleeves up and get the job done” kind of verification, easily understood, accessible to everyone, little specialized training required. Formal methods for many years remained the domain of … Read More


Virtually Verifying SSD Controllers

Virtually Verifying SSD Controllers
by Bernard Murphy on 09-26-2019 at 5:00 am

Datacenter storage

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are rapidly gaining popularity for storage in many applications, in gigabytes of storage in lightweight laptops to tens to hundreds of terabyte drives in datacenters. SSDs are intrinsically faster, quieter and lower-power than their hard disk-drive (HDD) equivalents, with roughly similar lifetimes,… Read More


How Should I Cache Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

How Should I Cache Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
by Bernard Murphy on 09-25-2019 at 5:00 am

cache hierarchy

Caching intent largely hasn’t changed since we started using the concept – to reduce average latency in memory accesses and to reduce average power consumption in off-chip reads and writes. The architecture started out simple enough, a small memory close to a processor, holding most-recently accessed instructions and data … Read More