Functional Safety – the Analytics

Functional Safety – the Analytics
by Bernard Murphy on 04-17-2018 at 7:00 am

ISO 26262 is serious stuff, the governing process behind automotive safety. But, as I have observed before, it doesn’t make for light reading. The standard is all about process and V-diagrams, mountains of documentation and accredited experts. I wouldn’t trade a word of it (or my safety) for a more satisfying read, but all that … Read More


A Turnkey Platform for High-Volume IoT

A Turnkey Platform for High-Volume IoT
by Bernard Murphy on 04-12-2018 at 7:00 am

Innovation in smart homes, smart buildings, smart factories and many other contexts differentiates in sensing, in some cases actuation, implementation certainly (low power for example) and rolling up data to the cloud. It isn’t in the on-board CPU and I doubt any of those entrepreneurs want to create their own Bluetooth or Wi-Fi… Read More


Emulation Outside the Box

Emulation Outside the Box
by Bernard Murphy on 04-10-2018 at 7:00 am

We all know the basic premise of emulation: hardware-assisted simulation running much faster than software-based simulation, with comparable accuracy for cycle-based 0/1 modeling, decently fast setup, and comparably fine-grained debug support. Pretty obvious value for running big jobs with long tests. But emulators tend… Read More


Stress and Aging

Stress and Aging
by Bernard Murphy on 04-05-2018 at 12:00 pm

These failings aren’t just a cross we humans bear; they’re also a concern for chips, particularly in electrical over-stress (EOS) and aging of the circuitry. Such concerns are not new, but they are taking on new urgency given the high reliability and long lifetime expectations we have for safety-critical components in cars and… Read More


A New Problem for High-Performance Mobile

A New Problem for High-Performance Mobile
by Bernard Murphy on 04-04-2018 at 7:00 am

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


Tutorial on Advanced Formal: NVIDIA and Qualcomm

Tutorial on Advanced Formal: NVIDIA and Qualcomm
by Bernard Murphy on 04-03-2018 at 7:00 am

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

The Future of Verification Management
by Bernard Murphy on 03-29-2018 at 7:00 am

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

A DVCon Tutorial on Advanced Formal Usage
by Bernard Murphy on 03-27-2018 at 7:00 am

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

Vertical Prototyping with Intel FPGAs
by Bernard Murphy on 03-26-2018 at 7:00 am

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

Qualcomm, AMD on Verification with Synopsys
by Bernard Murphy on 03-22-2018 at 7:00 am

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