Margin Call

Margin Call
by Bernard Murphy on 06-04-2017 at 7:00 am

A year ago, I wrote about Ansys’ intro of Big Data methods into the world of power integrity analysis. The motivation behind this advance was introduced in another blog, questioning how far margin-based approaches to complex multi-dimensional analyses could go. An accurate analysis of power integrity in a complex chip should… Read More


Getting to IP Functional Signoff

Getting to IP Functional Signoff
by Bernard Murphy on 06-01-2017 at 7:00 am

In the early days of IP reuse and platform-based design there was a widely-shared vision of in-house IP development teams churning out libraries of reusable IP, which could then be leveraged in many different SoC applications. This vision was enthusiastically pursued for a while; this is what drove reusability standards and … Read More


RTL Correct by Construction

RTL Correct by Construction
by Bernard Murphy on 05-31-2017 at 7:00 am

Themes in EDA come in waves and a popular theme from time to time is RTL signoff. That’s a tricky concept; you can’t signoff RTL in the sense of never having to go back and change the RTL. But the intent is still valuable – to get the top-level or subsystem-level RTL as well tested as possible, together with collateral data (SDC, UPF, etc)… Read More


Consolidation and Design Data Management

Consolidation and Design Data Management
by Bernard Murphy on 05-30-2017 at 7:00 am

Consensia, a Dassault Systemès channel partner, recently hosted a webinar on DesignSync, a long-standing pillar of many industry design flows (count ARM, Qualcomm, Cavium and NXP among their users). A motivation for this webinar was the impact semiconductor consolidation has had on the complexity of design data management,… Read More


Webinar: Getting to Accurate Power Estimates Earlier and Faster

Webinar: Getting to Accurate Power Estimates Earlier and Faster
by Bernard Murphy on 05-24-2017 at 7:00 am

Power has become a very important metric in modern designs – for mobile and IoT devices which must live on a battery charge for days or years, for datacenters where power costs can be as significant as capital costs, and for increasingly unavoidable regulatory reasons. But accurate power estimation on a design must start from an … Read More


CDC Verification for FPGA – Beyond the Basics

CDC Verification for FPGA – Beyond the Basics
by Bernard Murphy on 05-23-2017 at 12:00 pm

FPGAs have become a lot more capable and a lot more powerful, more closely resembling SoCs than the glue-logic we once considered them to be. Look at any big FPGA – a Xilinx Zynq, an Intel/Altera Arria or a Microsemi SmartFusion; these devices are full-blown SoCs, functionally different from an ASIC SoC only in that some of the device… Read More


Two-Factor Authentication on the Edge

Two-Factor Authentication on the Edge
by Bernard Murphy on 05-18-2017 at 7:00 am

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


Webinar – Voice Interfaces of the Future

Webinar – Voice Interfaces of the Future
by Bernard Murphy on 05-17-2017 at 7:00 am

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

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