About 6 months ago, ANSYS was approached by a couple of leading mobile platform vendors/suppliers with a challenging problem. These companies were hitting target 2.5GHz performance goals on their (N10 or N7) application processors, but getting about 10% lower yield than expected, which they attributed to performance failures.… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Tutorial on Advanced Formal: NVIDIA and Qualcomm
I recently posted a blog on the first half of a tutorial Synopsys hosted at DVCon (2018). This blog covers the second half of that 3½ hour event (so you can see why I didn’t jam it all into one blog :D. The general theme was on advanced use models, the first half covering use of invariants and induction and views from a Samsung expert on efficient… Read More
The Future of Verification Management
One of the great aspects of modern hardware verification is that we keep adding new tools and methodologies to support different verification objectives (formal, simulation, real-number simulation, emulation, prototyping, UVM, PSS, software-driven verification, continuous integration, …). One of the downsides to this… Read More
A DVCon Tutorial on Advanced Formal Usage
Synopsys has been quite active lately in their messaging around formal verification. One such event at DVCon this year was a tutorial on some of the more advanced techniques/ methodologies that are accessible to formal teams, mostly presented by customers, though opened by a Synopsys presentation. The tutorial covered so many… Read More
Vertical Prototyping with Intel FPGAs
It has been an article of faith in the design tools business that there’s little to be gained from targeting market verticals because as far as tools are concerned, all verticals have the same needs. Which is good in some respects; you maximize the breadth of the market to which tooling can appeal. But in so doing the depth of contribution… Read More
Qualcomm, AMD on Verification with Synopsys
Synopsys hosts a regular lunch at DVCon each year (at least over the last few years I have checked), a nice meal and a show, opening a marketing update followed by 2-3 customer presentations on how they use Synopsys verification in their flows. This year’s event was moderated by Piyush Sancheti from Synopsys Verification marketing… Read More
Formal: Going Deep and Going Early
This year I got a chance to talk with Cadence at DVCon on a whole bunch of topics, so expect a steady stream of blogs over the next couple of months. First up was an update from Pete Hardee (Director of Product Management) on, surprise, surprise, formal verification. I’m always trying to learn more about this space, so I picked a couple… Read More
Machine Learning Neural Nets and the On-Chip Network
Machine learning (ML), and neural nets (NNs) as a subset of ML, are blossoming in all sorts of applications, not just in the cloud but now even more at the edge. We can now find them in our phones, in our cars, even in IoT applications. We have all seen applications for intelligent vision (e.g. pedestrian detection) and voice recognition… Read More
Another Application of Automated RTL Editing
DeFacto and their STAR technology are already quite well known among those who want to procedurally apply edits to system-level RTL. I’m not talking here about the kind of edits you would make with your standard edit tools. Rather these are the more convoluted sort of changes you might attempt with Perl (or perhaps Python these days).… Read More
An Advanced-User View of Applied Formal
Thanks to my growing involvement in formal (at least in writing about it), I was happy to accept an invite to this year’s Oski DVCon dinner / Formal Leadership Summit. In addition to Oski folks and Brian Bailey (an esteemed colleague at another blog site, to steal a Frank Schirrmeister line), a lively group of formal users attended… Read More
The Data Crisis is Unfolding – Are We Ready?