Learn How to Debug UVM Test Benches Faster – Upcoming Synopsys Webinar

Learn How to Debug UVM Test Benches Faster – Upcoming Synopsys Webinar
by Bernard Murphy on 07-14-2016 at 4:00 pm

UVM for developing testbenches is a wonderful thing, as most verification engineers will attest. It provides abstraction capabilities, it encapsulates powerful operations, it simplifies and unifies constrained-random testing – it has really revolutionized the way we verify at the block and subsystem level.

However great… Read More


Android Auto-Rooting Malware – You Can Run But You Can’t Hide

Android Auto-Rooting Malware – You Can Run But You Can’t Hide
by Bernard Murphy on 07-14-2016 at 7:00 am

There has been a startling rise in a class of Android auto-rooting malware which is believed to affect over a quarter of a million phones in the US and well over a million in each of India and China. The attack has primarily infected older versions of Android (so far) – KitKat, JellyBean and Lolipop primarily.

The malware, known as Shedun… Read More


Galaxy S7 and the Ongoing Charging Guessing Game

Galaxy S7 and the Ongoing Charging Guessing Game
by Bernard Murphy on 07-12-2016 at 7:00 am

In the back-and-forth competition between Samsung and Apple, the Galaxy S7 certainly seems to have notched a few wins over the iPhone 6S. Most reviewers feel the Samsung camera is noticeably superior and the overall look and feel is on a par with or better than the Apple product. I want to focus on just one area where Samsung differs… Read More


From Zero to IoT Prototype in One Month

From Zero to IoT Prototype in One Month
by Bernard Murphy on 06-30-2016 at 7:00 am

The best things in life may not always be free, but they don’t have to be incredibly difficult to get to. A challenge for IoT designers has been that their bubbling excitement over the potential of their new gizmo is quickly tempered by the complexities of actually building the hardware. Not exactly what they have come to expect in … Read More


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