Two-factor authentication has become commonplace for those of us determined to keep the bad guys at bay. You first request entry to a privileged site through a user-name/password, which in turn sends a code to your mobile device that you must enter to complete your admission to the site (there are other second factor methods, but… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Webinar – Voice Interfaces of the Future
In our favorite Sci-Fi or fantasy movies or series we routinely expect voice-control of the many devices encountered in those stories. This seems natural because that’s how we most easily communicate our needs and intent (short of direct brain connections, though Elon Musk is apparently working on that). Typing on a keyboard … Read More
High Frequency Trading and EDA
Pop quiz – name an event at which an EDA vendor would be unlikely to exhibit. How about The Trading Show in Chicago, later this month? That’s trading as in markets, high-frequency trading, blockchain and all that other trading-centric financial technology. This is another market, like cloud, where performance is everything and… Read More
Power Checks for Your Libraries
When your design doesn’t work, who owns that problem? I don’t believe the answer to this question has changed significantly since semiconductor design started, despite distributed sourcing for IP and manufacturing. Some things like yield can (sometimes) be pushed back to the foundry, but mostly the design company owns the problem.… Read More
Polishing Parallelism
The great thing about competition in free markets is that vendors are always pushing their products to find an edge. You the consumer don’t have to do much to take advantage of these advances (other than possibly paying for new options). You just sit back and watch the tool you use get faster and deliver better QoR. You may think that… Read More
System-Level Power Estimation
When I first saw that Rob Knoth (Product Director at Cadence) had proposed this topic as a subject for a blog, my reaction was “well, how accurate can that be?” I’ve been around the power business for a while, so I should know better. It’s interesting that I jumped straight to that one metric for QoR; I suspect many others will do the same.… Read More
Simulating ADAS
Simulation is a broad technique spanning certainly digital logic and circuit simulation but also methods beyond these which are particularly relevant to ADAS design. In fact, much of the design of full ADAS systems begins and ends with these types of modeling. This is in part due to the need fully validate integrity and reliability… Read More
Quantifying Formal Coverage
Verification coverage is a tricky concept. Ideally a definition would measure against how many paths were tested of every possible path through the complete state graph, but that goal is unimaginably out of reach for any typical design. Instead we fall back on proxies for completeness, like hitting every line in the code. This … Read More
Webinar – Next Generation DDRM Needs, Solutions
I’m a believer in product life-cycle management (PLM) for semiconductor design. It’s not an attention-grabbing topic like faster verification or improved PPA in implementation, but now massive IP-based design is routine, IP’s are sourced from multiple suppliers each cycling though multiple revisions and now that design … Read More
Lip-Bu on Opportunity
Given a chance to talk with someone as connected as Lip-Bu Tan (President and CEO of Cadence and Chairman of the VC firm Walden International), it is tempting to ask all the usual questions about industry growth and directions in cloud, automotive, IIoT, AI and so on. I wanted to try something different. If you make a living (or plan… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay