A few years back people were saying that the “EDA” problem was solved and that design tools had become commodity. At the same time people hailed ADAS, smart homes, mobile communication and AI as the frontiers of electronics. Perhaps it could be said that layout tools, routers, placers, and circuit simulators had largely matured… Read More
Lint for Implementation
When I was at Atrenta, we took advantage of opportunities to expand our static tool (aka linting) first to clock domain crossing (CDC) analysis and DFT compatibility and later to static analysis of timing constraints, all of which have importance in implementation. CDC is commonly thought of as an RTL-centric analysis, however,… Read More
Tensilica DNA 100 Brings the AI Inference Solution for Level 2 ADAS ECUs and Level 4 Autonomous Driving
I recently wrote about Tensilica’s HiFi DSPs which played a significant role at Cadence’s Automotive Design Summit which was held on the Cadence San Jose campus at the end of July. That article focused on infotainment while briefly touching on Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS). ADAS is NOT synonymous with autopilot.… Read More
Tensilica HiFi DSPs for What I Want to Hear, and What I Don’t Want to Hear
It seems every day we see a new article (or ten) on autonomous driving. It is an especially hot topic, and it will happen someday. For now, we can dream about it, and many people are working on it. But for the present, the technology in a car that commands my attention is audio. I’ve been a musician since 4th grade. I still perform occasionally… Read More
Tortuga Webinar: Ensuring System Level Security Through HW/SW Verification
We all know (I hope) that security is important so we’re willing to invest time and money in this area but there are a couple of problems. First there’s no point in making your design secure if it’s not competitive and making it competitive is hard enough, so the great majority of resource and investment is going to go into that objective.… Read More
Virtuoso Adapts to Address Cyber Physical Systems
LIDAR is a controversial topic, with even Elon Musk weighing in on whether it will ever be feasible for use in self driving cars. His contention is that the sensors will remain too expensive and potentially be unreliable because of their mechanical complexity. However, each of the sensors available for autonomous driving have … Read More
#DAC56 – Optimizing Verification Throughput for Advanced Designs in a Connected World
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
Smart Hearing is Heating Up
A lot of the attention in intelligent systems is on object detection in still or video images but there’s another very active area, in smart audio. Amazon and Google smart speakers may be the best-known applications but there are more obvious (and perhaps less novelty-driven) applications in enhancing the hearing devices we already… Read More
SiP is the new SoC @ 56thDAC
The emergence of 3D packaging technology has been accompanied by the term “more than Moore”, to reflect the increase in areal circuit density at a rate that exceeds the traditional IC scaling pace associated with Moore’s Law. At the recent Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas, numerous exhibits on the vendor floor presented… Read More
The Complexity of Block-Level Placement @ 56thDAC
The recent Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas was an indication of how the electronics industry is evolving. In its formative years, DAC was focused on the fundamental algorithms emerging from academic research and industrial R&D, that enabled the continuation of the Moore’s Law complexity curve. (Indeed, the… Read More