Getting Maximum Performance Bang for Your Buck through Parallelism

Getting Maximum Performance Bang for Your Buck through Parallelism
by Bernard Murphy on 06-26-2016 at 12:00 pm

Finding a way to optimally parallelize linear code for multi-processor platforms has been a holy grail of computer science for many years. The challenge is that we think linearly and design algorithms in the same way, but then want to speed up our analysis by adding parallelism to the algorithms we have already designed.

But the … Read More


Design for the System Age

Design for the System Age
by Bernard Murphy on 06-17-2016 at 7:00 am

Of late, it has become painfully obvious that the value of electronics is in the system. And since systems demand continuing improvement, increasing performance and decreasing cost (once partially guaranteed by semiconductor process advances) is now sought through algorithm advances – witness the Google TPU and custom… Read More


Climbing the Infinite Verification Mountain

Climbing the Infinite Verification Mountain
by Bernard Murphy on 06-14-2016 at 7:00 am

Many years ago I read a great little book by Rudy Rucker called “Infinity and the Mind”. This book attempts to explain the many classes of mathematical infinity (cardinals) to non-specialists. As he gets to the more abstract levels of infinity, the author has to resort to an analogy to give a feel for extendible and other cardinal … Read More


The Evolution of Emulation

The Evolution of Emulation
by Bernard Murphy on 06-13-2016 at 7:00 am

Mentor hosted a panel on emulation in their booth at DAC this year. One thing I really liked about this panel is that it didn’t include anyone from Mentor. Not that I have anything against Mentor employees, who are a fine bunch of people from those I know, but I find panels most interesting when the discussion is purely among customers.… Read More


Facebook and Deep Reasoning with Memory

Facebook and Deep Reasoning with Memory
by Bernard Murphy on 06-05-2016 at 4:00 pm

Neural nets as described in many recent articles are very capable at recognizing objects and written and spoken text. But like anything we can build, or even imagine, they have limitations. One problem is that after training, the neural nets we usually encounter are essentially stateless. They can recognize static patterns but… Read More


Google, Deep Reasoning and Natural Language Understanding

Google, Deep Reasoning and Natural Language Understanding
by Bernard Murphy on 05-27-2016 at 7:00 am

Understanding natural language is considered a hard problem in artificial intelligence. You could be forgiven for thinking this can’t be right – surely language recognition systems already have this problem mostly solved? If so, you might be confusing recognition with understanding – loosely, recognition is the phonology… Read More


Rebooting EDA

Rebooting EDA
by Bernard Murphy on 05-23-2016 at 7:00 am

In the 35 years since commercial EDA went mainstream a lot of advances have been made but the fundamental architecture and even the philosophy of tooling have really not advanced at all. Tools are designed around individual tasks – analysis and optimization within a specific domain – under the assumption that variability within… Read More


Google TPU Another Step in a Shifting Semiconductor Landscape

Google TPU Another Step in a Shifting Semiconductor Landscape
by Bernard Murphy on 05-22-2016 at 4:00 pm

Markets work when consumers of a widget don’t feel there is significant differentiated value in making their own and would rather get lowest possible cost from experienced widget makers who can amortize their investment over high-volume sales to many customers. But that changes when a large consumer finds they can increase differentiated… Read More


DAC 2016 – Register Now

DAC 2016 – Register Now
by Bernard Murphy on 05-16-2016 at 7:00 am

DAC is again going to be in Austin (reason enough to go), from June 6[SUP]th[/SUP]-8[SUP]th[/SUP] for the main event. A number of events caught my eye:

  • Monday AM – custom hardware for algorithmic trading. If you want to know more about FinTech (technology for finance) this could be for you
  • Another Monday morning session on Linux
Read More

Getting Low Power Design Right in Mixed Signal Designs

Getting Low Power Design Right in Mixed Signal Designs
by Bernard Murphy on 05-12-2016 at 4:00 pm

Mixed-signal design creates all sorts of interesting problems for implementation and verification flows, particularly when it comes to design for low power. We tend to think of mixed-signal as a few blocks like PLLs, ADCs and PHYs on the periphery of the design. Constrain and verify the digital power requirements up to analog … Read More