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


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