High Frequency Trading and EDA

High Frequency Trading and EDA
by Bernard Murphy on 05-16-2017 at 7:00 am

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

Power Checks for Your Libraries
by Bernard Murphy on 05-12-2017 at 7:00 am

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

Polishing Parallelism
by Bernard Murphy on 05-11-2017 at 7:00 am

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

System-Level Power Estimation
by Bernard Murphy on 05-09-2017 at 7:00 am

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

Simulating ADAS
by Bernard Murphy on 05-04-2017 at 7:00 am

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

Quantifying Formal Coverage
by Bernard Murphy on 05-03-2017 at 7:00 am

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

Webinar – Next Generation DDRM Needs, Solutions
by Bernard Murphy on 05-02-2017 at 7:00 am

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

Lip-Bu on Opportunity
by Bernard Murphy on 04-27-2017 at 7:00 am

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


A Self-Contained Software-Driven Prototype

A Self-Contained Software-Driven Prototype
by Bernard Murphy on 04-26-2017 at 7:00 am

You’re building an IP, subsystem or SoC and you want to use a prototype together with a software testbench to drive extensive validation testing. I’m not talking here about the software running on the IP/SoC processor(s); the testbench should wrap around the whole DUT. This is a very common requirement. The standard approach to… Read More


The CDNLive Keynotes

The CDNLive Keynotes
by Bernard Murphy on 04-25-2017 at 7:00 am

I’m developing a taste for user-group meetings. In my (fairly) recently assumed role as a member of the media, I’m only allowed into the keynotes, but from what I have seen, vendors work hard to make these fresh and compelling each year through big-bang product updates and industry/academic leaders talking about their work in bleeding-edge… Read More