Neural nets are hot these days. In this forum certainly you can’t swing a cat without hitting multiple articles on the topic – I’ve written some myself. For me there are two reasons for this interest. First, neural nets are amazingly successful at what they do, for example in image recognition where they can beat… Read More
Author: Bernard Murphy
Ecosystem Partnership for Effective Network Hardware Design
When you’re designing a hardware solution to plug into what is arguably the most complex system of all – the Internet – you can’t get away with a little fake traffic to test whether your box is going to do all the right things at the right performance. You have to model realistic voice, video, data and wireless traffic in… Read More
Software-Driven Verification Drives Tight Links between Emulation and Prototyping
I’ve mentioned many times what has become a very common theme in SoC and system verification – it has to be driven by the software because any concept of exhaustively verifying “everything” is neither feasible nor meaningful. Emulation has become a critical component of this flow in validating and regressing… Read More
Metric-Driven Verification for System Signoff
Everyone knows that verification is hard and is consuming an increasing percentage of verification time and effort. And everyone should know that system-level verification (SoC plus at least some software and maybe models for other components on a board) is even harder—which is why you see hand-wringing over how incompletely… Read More
SpyGlass DFT ADV accelerates test closure – Xilinx and Synopsys webinar
Fed up with ECOing your way out of test problems? You might want to register for this webinar.When you’re building monster SoC FPGAs, you have all the same problems you have with any other SoC. That includes getting to very high test coverage as quickly as you can with a design targeted to the most advanced processes. We’re not just … Read More
Quantum Code-Cracking Takes Another Hit: Lattice-based Cryptography
Public-key crypto-systems rely these days on approaches founded in mathematical methods which are provably hard to crack. The easiest to understand requires factorization of a key based on the product of two large prime numbers. Much has been made recently of the ability of quantum computers to crack this style of encryption.… Read More
Digital Design Trends – A Cadence Perspective
I talked with Paul Cunningham (VP front-end digital R&D) at CDNLive recently to get a Cadence perspective on digital design trends. He sees needs from traditional semiconductor companies evolving as usual, with disruption here and there from consolidation. But on the system side there is explosion in demand – for wearables,… Read More
More on the Practical Uses of Automation
There’s a good article in the March issue of the Communications of the ACM which follows a theme I commented in my “One, Two Many” post. But the CACM article has a better title: “Automation should be like Iron Man, not Ultron”.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the movies, Iron Man is a man (Tony Stark)… Read More
A CIA Perspective on Privacy and Security
It may seem odd to look to the CIA for viewpoints in this area but in in many ways they are just as concerned as we are. After all, in aggregate, widespread identity theft and hacking both internally and by foreign nationals, theft, electronic ransom and other illicit acts are as much a threat to the security of the country as they are … Read More
SystemC and Adam’s Law
At DVCon I sat in on a series of talks on using higher-level abstraction for design, then met Adam Sherer to get his perspective on progress in bringing SystemC to the masses (Adam runs simulation-based verification products at Cadence and organized the earlier session). I have to admit I have been a SystemC skeptic (pace Gary Smith)… Read More
The Intel Common Platform Foundry Alliance