Formal verification has made significant inroads in RTL and gate-level verification because it provides complementary strengths to conventional dynamic verification methods; using both provides higher levels of coverage and confidence in the correctness of an implementation. I haven’t heard as much about formal use in … Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
A Bundle of Goodies in Bluetooth 5.2, LE Audio
You know that a technology is becoming a trend to watch when the Economist writes a piece on the topic. We know how big an investment goes into monetizing visual content for our phones, pads and TVs, through the likes of Warner Media, Disney and Netflix. Now there’s a big push into monetizing our ears, driven by Apple and others on the… Read More
Innovation in Verification – January 2020
I’m kicking off a blog series which should appeal to many of us in functional verification. Paul Cunningham (GM of the Verification Group at Cadence), Jim Hogan (angel investor and board member extraordinaire) and I (sometime blogger) like to noodle from time to time on papers and other verification articles which inspire us.… Read More
Tortuga Logic Scores Role in DoD Security Programs
It should be no surprise in the current climate that the US government is ramping up investment in microelectronics security, particularly with an eye on China and investments they are making in the same area. This has two major thrusts as I read it: to ensure trusted and assured microelectronics are being used in US defense systems… Read More
ANSYS, TSMC Document Thermal Reliability Guidelines
Advanced IC technologies, 5nm and 7nm FinFET design and stacked packaging, are enabling massive levels of integration of super-fast circuits. These in turn enable much of the exciting new technology we hear so much about: mobile gaming and ultra-high definition mobile video through enhanced mobile broadband in 5G, which requires… Read More
No Coal in This Stocking: VCs and Nuclear Fusion
Tis the time of year when product pitches are 100% at consumers. No-one in their right mind wants to push the nerdy behind-the-scenes stuff we usually talk about. This is a chance for me to go off the rails a little and consider unusual directions in innovation. We know all about VCs underwriting self-driving cars, intelligent everything… Read More
A VIP to Accelerate Verification for Hyperscalar Caching
Non-volatile memory (NVM) is finding new roles in datacenters, not currently so much in “cold storage” as a replacement for hard disk drives, but definitely in “warm storage”. Warm storage applications target an increasing number of functions requiring access to databases with much lower latency than is possible through paths… Read More
Autonomous Driving Still Terra Incognita
I already posted on one automotive panel at this year’s Arm TechCon. A second I attended was a more open-ended discussion on where we’re really at in autonomous driving. Most of you probably agree we’ve passed the peak of the hype curve and are now into the long slog of trying to connect hope to reality. There are a lot of challenges, … Read More
The First Must-Have in 5G
If I was asked about must-have needs for 5G, I’d probably talk about massive MIMO and a lot of exotic parallel DSP processing, also perhaps need for new intelligent approaches to link adaptation and intelligent network slicing in the infrastructure. But there’s something that comes before that all that digital cleverness, in … Read More
Arm Inches Closer to Supercomputing
When it comes to Arm, we think mostly of phones and the “things” in the IoT. We know they’re in a lot of other places too, such as communications infrastructure but that’s a kind of diffuse image – “yeah, they’re everywhere”. We like easy-to-understand targets: phones, IoT devices, we get those. More recently Arm started to talk about… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet