Achieving Functional Safety through a Certified Flow

Achieving Functional Safety through a Certified Flow
by Daniel Payne on 08-26-2019 at 10:00 am

Methodics: Tool and process certification

Functional safety (FuSa) is a big deal, especially when driving a car. My beloved 1998 Acura RL recently exhibited a strange behavior at 239K miles, after making a turn the steering wheel would stay tilted in the direction of the last turn instead of straightening out. The auto mechanic pinpointed the failure to the ball joints, … Read More


Speeding up Circuit Simulation using a GPU Approach

Speeding up Circuit Simulation using a GPU Approach
by Daniel Payne on 08-22-2019 at 10:00 am

ALPS-GT

The old adage that “Time is Money” certainly rings true in the semiconductor world where IC designers are being challenged with getting their new designs to market quickly, and correctly in the first spin of silicon. Circuit designers work at the transistor-level, and circuit simulation is one of the most time-consuming… Read More


Making pre-Silicon Verification Plausible for Autonomous Vehicles

Making pre-Silicon Verification Plausible for Autonomous Vehicles
by Daniel Payne on 08-20-2019 at 10:00 am

AV diagram

I love reading about the amazing progress of autonomous vehicles, like when Audi and their A8 model sedan was the first to reach Level 3 autonomy, closely followed by Tesla at Level 2, although Tesla gets way more media attention here in the US. A friend of mine bought his wife a car that offers adaptive cruise control with auto-braking,… Read More


Webinar: Designing Complex SoCs and Dealing with Multiple File Formats

Webinar: Designing Complex SoCs and Dealing with Multiple File Formats
by Daniel Payne on 08-12-2019 at 10:00 am

StarVision Pro

In SoC design it’s all about managing complexity through modeling, and the models that make up IC designs come in a wide range of file formats like:

  • Transistor-level , SPICE
  • Interconnect parasitics, SPEF
  • Gate and RTL, Verilog, VHDL

Even with standard file formats, designers still have to traverse the hierarchy to find out… Read More


IP Lifecycle Management and Permissions

IP Lifecycle Management and Permissions
by Daniel Payne on 07-29-2019 at 10:00 am

Percipient IPLM

My first professional experience with computers and file permissions was at Intel in the late 1970s, where we used big iron IBM mainframes located far away in another state, and each user could edit their own files along with browse shared files from co-workers in the same department. I saw this same file permission concept when … Read More


#DAC56 – Optimizing Verification Throughput for Advanced Designs in a Connected World

#DAC56 – Optimizing Verification Throughput for Advanced Designs in a Connected World
by Daniel Payne on 07-24-2019 at 10:00 am

Cadence, DAC 56, Wednesday

It was the final day of DAC56 and my head was already spinning from information overload after meeting so many people and hearing so many presentations, but I knew that IC functional verification was a huge topic and looming bottleneck for many SoC design teams, so I made a last-minute email request to attend a luncheon panel discussion… Read More


Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++

Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++
by Daniel Payne on 07-11-2019 at 8:00 am

Konica Minolta printer

In the early days of chip design circa 1970’s the engineers would write logic equations, then manually reduce that logic using Karnaugh Maps. Next, we had the first generation of logic synthesis in the early 1980’s, which read in a gate-level netlist, performed logic reduction, then output a smaller gate-level netlist.… Read More


#56DAC Update – What’s New at Concept Engineering

#56DAC Update – What’s New at Concept Engineering
by Daniel Payne on 07-02-2019 at 10:00 am

Concept Engineering, DAC56

I first connected with Gerhard Angst of Concept Engineering over 15 years ago, because I was using their SpiceVision PRO tool to visual SPICE netlists received from customer designs to be debugged in a FastSPICE circuit simulator. The ability to visualize a transistor-level netlist was simply essential to quickly understanding… Read More


#56DAC – Functional Safety Panel hosted by Mentor

#56DAC – Functional Safety Panel hosted by Mentor
by Daniel Payne on 06-19-2019 at 5:28 pm

Four experts in the discipline of functional safety were gathered together at #56DAC in Vegas earlier in June, hosted at the Mentor booth, so I rested my legs and typed notes as fast as I could. The product areas that I first think about when functional safety (FuSa) comes up are automotive, medical and aerospace, because keeping… Read More


#56DAC – What’s New with Custom Design Platform

#56DAC – What’s New with Custom Design Platform
by Daniel Payne on 06-12-2019 at 10:00 am

Dave Reed, Synopsys

TSMC attends DAC every year and they do something very savvy, it’s a theatre where they invite all of their EDA and IP partners to present something of interest, followed by a drawing for a prize. At the end of the day they even have a nice prize, like a MacBook Air, which I didn’t win. On Wednesday I watched Dave Reed of SynopsysRead More