Lip-Bu (Cadence CEO) sure knows how to draw a crowd. For the opening keynote in CadenceLIVE (Americas) this year, he reprised his data-centric revolution pitch, followed by a talk from a VP at AWS on bending the curve in chip development. And that was followed by a talk by a Facebook director of strategy and technology on aspects of… Read More
Quick Error Detection. Innovation in Verification
Can we detect bugs in post- and pre-silicon testing where we can drastically reduce latency between root-cause and effect? Quick error detection can. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas. Feel free to comment.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Logic Bug Detection… Read More
The Big Three Weigh in on Emulation Best Practices
As software content increases in system-on-chip and system-in-package designs, emulation has become a critical enabling technology for the software team. This technology offers software developers the opportunity to verify their code in against a high-fidelity model of the target system that actually executes fast enough… Read More
Cadence Increases Verification Efficiency up to 5X with Xcelium ML
SoC verification has always been an interesting topic for me. Having worked at companies like Zycad that offered hardware accelerators for logic and fault simulation, the concept of reducing the time needed to verify a complex SoC has occupied a lot of my thoughts. The bar we always tried to clear was actually simple to articulate… Read More
Structural CDC Analysis Signoff? Think Again.
Talking not so long ago to a friend from my Atrenta days, I learned that the great majority of design teams still run purely structural CDC analysis. You should sure asynchronous clock domains are suitably represented in the SDC, find all places where data crosses between those domains that require a synchronizer, gray-coded FIFO… Read More
Cadence on Automotive Safety: Without Security, There is no Safety
One of the Designer Track at this year’s DAC focused on the popular topic of automotive electronics. The title was particularly on-point, The Modern Automobile: A Safety and Security “Hot Zone”. The session was chaired by Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, a Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur.
This special, invited… Read More
DAC Panel: Cadence Weighs in on AI for EDA, What Applications, Where’s the Data?
DAC was full of great panels, research papers and chip design stories this year, the same as other years. Being a virtual show, there were some differences of course. I’ve heard attendance was way up, allowing a lot more folks to experience the technical program. This is likely to be true for a virtual event. I’m sure we’ll see more… Read More
#57DAC – Panel Discussion of High Level Synthesis
Presenters took a trip down memory lane at DAC this year by having a panel discussion on HLS (High Level Synthesis) spanning from 1974 to 2020, and that time period aligns with when I first graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1978, starting chip design at Intel, then later transitioning into EDA companies by 1986. Marilyn… Read More
Cadence Defines a New Signoff Paradigm with Tempus PI
Semiconductor technology advances have a way of rewriting the rule book. As process geometries shrink, subtle effects graduate to mainstream problems. Performance curves can become inverted. And no matter what else occurs, low power demands are constantly reducing voltage and design margins along with it. Sometimes these… Read More
Using AI to Locate a Fault. Innovation in Verification
After we detect a bug, can we use AI to locate the fault, or at least get close? Paul Cunningham (GM of Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas, through a paper in software verification we find equally relevant to hardware. Feel free to comment.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is… Read More