In November of 2016, I made a bold statement that October 20, 2016 would stand as a watershed day in integrated photonics. The reason for this claim was that GLOBALFOUNDRIES proclaimed that integrated photonics was real and here to stay. The same week I wrote an article about Cadence Design Systems securing a photonic beachhead … Read More
Anirudh on Verification
I was fortunate to have a 1-on-1 with Anirudh before he delivered the keynote at DVCon. In case you don’t know the name, Dr. Anirudh Devgan is Executive VP and GM of the Digital & Signoff Group and the System & Verification Group at Cadence. He’s on a meteoric rise in the company, not least for what he has done for Cadence’s position… Read More
Perspective in Verification
At DVCon I had a chance to discuss PSS and real-life applications with Tom Anderson (product management director at Cadence). Tom is very actively involved in the PSS working group and is now driving the Cadence offering in this area (Perspec System Verifier), so he has a pretty good perspective on the roots, the evolution and practical… Read More
Simulation done Faster
When it comes to functional verification of large designs, huge progress is being made in emulation and FPGA-based prototyping (about which I’ll have more to say in follow-on blogs), but simulation still dominates verification activity, all the way from IP verification to gate-level signoff. For many, while it is much slower… Read More
Prototyping: Sooner, Easier, Congruent
DVCon 2017 is a big week for Cadence verification announcements. They just released their Xcelium simulation acceleration product (on which I have another blog) and they have also released their latest and greatest prototyping solution in the Protium S1. This is new hardware based on Virtex UltraScale FPGAs on Cadence-designed… Read More
PowerTree — a data repository and simulation platform for PCB power distribution networks
The difficulty of managing the power domains on a complex SoC led to the development of a power format file description, to serve as the repository for data needed for functional and electrical analysis (e.g., CPF, UPF). Yet, what about complex printed circuit boards? How can the power domain information be effectively represented… Read More
Making Functional Simulation Faster with a Parallel Approach
I’ll never forgot working at Intel on a team designing a graphics chip when we wanted to simulate to ensure proper functionality before tapeout, however because of the long run times it was decided to make a compromise to speed things up by reducing the size of the display window to just 32×32 pixels. Well, when first silicon… Read More
Aspirational Congruence
When talking to suppliers about their products, conversation tends to focus heavily on what they already have and why it is the answer to every imaginable need in their space. So it’s refreshing when a vendor wants to talk about where customers want to go without claiming they already have the answer wrapped up in a bow. I recently … Read More
Getting Ready for Bluetooth-5 Verification
Bluetooth has been very successful for many years, but arguably trapped in a niche, at least for us consumers, as a short-range wireless alternative to a wire connection – to connect your phone to a car or speakers for example. (In fairness I should add that the 4.2 version has improved range and Bluetooth has already become quite … Read More
Reducing the Cost of SoC Testing
Every year certain technology themes appear, like at ITC this year a big theme was how to reduce the cost of SoC testing. I spoke with Rob Knoth of Cadence by phone to hear more about this cost of test theme. Rob gave me an example of an SoC that takes 27 seconds on a tester, so at $0.04 per second in test costs amounts to $1.08 per part. If you… Read More