An IIot Gateway to the Cloud

An IIot Gateway to the Cloud
by Bernard Murphy on 10-10-2017 at 7:00 am

A piece of learning we all seem to have gained from practical considerations of IoT infrastructure is that no, it doesn’t make sense to ship all the data from an IoT edge device to the cloud and let the cloud do all the computational heavy lifting. On the face of it that idea seemed good – all those edge devices could be super cheap (silicon… Read More


An Informal Update

An Informal Update
by Bernard Murphy on 10-05-2017 at 7:00 am

I mentioned back in June that Synopsys had launched a blog on formal verification, intended to demystify the field and provide help in understanding key concepts. It’s been a few months, time to check in on some of their more recent posts.


First up, it feels like they are finding their groove. Relaxed style, useful topics but now with… Read More


Adoption, Architecture and Origami

Adoption, Architecture and Origami
by Bernard Murphy on 10-03-2017 at 7:00 am

Last week I sat in on Oski’s latest in a series of “Decoding Formal” sessions. Judging by my first experience, they plan and manage these events very well. Not too long (~3 hours of talks), good food (DishDash), good customer content, a good forward-looking topic and a very entertaining wrap-up talk.… Read More


High-Speed Equivalence Checking

High-Speed Equivalence Checking
by Bernard Murphy on 09-28-2017 at 7:00 am

Following on product introductions for simulation and prototyping, physical verification and implementation earlier in the year, Anirudh Devgan (Exec VP and GM at Cadence), the king of speed and parallelism has done it again, this time with logic equivalence checking (LEC). Cadence recently announced an advance to their well-known… Read More


Verification Trends: 2016

Verification Trends: 2016
by Bernard Murphy on 09-26-2017 at 7:00 am

Periodically Mentor does us all a big favor by commissioning a survey of verification engineers across the world to illuminate trends in verification. This is valuable not only to satisfy our intellectual curiosity but also to help convince managers and finance mandarins that our enthusiasm to invest in new methods and tools … Read More


Clock Gating Optimization

Clock Gating Optimization
by Bernard Murphy on 09-21-2017 at 7:00 am

You can save a lot of power in a design by gating clocks. For much of the time in a complex multi-function design, many (often most) of the clocks are toggling registers whose input values aren’t changing. Which means that those toggles are changing nothing functionally yet they are still burning power. Why not turn off those clock… Read More


Partitioning for Prototypes

Partitioning for Prototypes
by Bernard Murphy on 09-19-2017 at 7:00 am

I earlier wrote a piece to make you aware of a webinar to be hosted by Aldec on some of their capabilities for partitioning large designs for prototyping. That webinar has now been broadcast and I have provided a link to the recorded version at the end of this piece. The webinar gets into the details of how exactly you would use the software… Read More


Webinar: Signoff for Thermal, Reliability and More in Advanced FinFET designs

Webinar: Signoff for Thermal, Reliability and More in Advanced FinFET designs
by Bernard Murphy on 09-17-2017 at 7:00 am

In automotive applications, advanced FinFET processes are great for high levels of integration and low power. But they also present some new challenges in reliability signoff. Ansys will be hosting a webinar to highlight the challenges faced by engineers trying to ensure thermal, electromigration (EM) and electrostatic discharge… Read More


Power Integrity from 3DIC to Board

Power Integrity from 3DIC to Board
by Bernard Murphy on 09-14-2017 at 7:00 am

The semiconductor industry has built decades of success on hyper-integration to increase functionality and performance while also reducing system cost. But the standard way to do this, to jam more and more functionality onto a single die, breaks down when some of the functions you want to integrate are built in different processes.… Read More


Life Imitates Art

Life Imitates Art
by Bernard Murphy on 09-12-2017 at 7:00 am

Neural nets, neuromorphic computing and other manifestations of artificial intelligence are popular topics these days. You might think of this as art (as in the art of computing) imitating life. What about the other direction – does life ever imitate art in this same sense? A professor at ASU’s Biodesign Institute thinks it can,… Read More