Something is brewing in automotive electronics. Within a one-month window most of the product announcements and pitches to which I am being invited are on automotive topics. Automotive markets have long been one of the primary targets for suppliers to system designers, but this level of alignment in announcements seems more … Read More
BDD-Based Formal for Floating Point. Innovation in Verification
A different approach to formally verifying very challenging datapath functions. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome. We’re planning to add a wrinkle… Read More
Photonic Computing – Now or Science Fiction?
Cadence recently held an event to dig into the emerging world of photonic computing. Called The Rise of Photonic Computing, it was a two-day event held in San Jose on February 7th and 8th. The first day of the event was also accessible virtually. I attended a panel discussion on the topic – more to come on that. The day delivered a rich… Read More
Cadence Debuts Celsius Studio for In-Design Thermal Optimization
Continuing the multiphysics theme, I talked recently with Melika Roshandell (Product Management Director at Cadence) on the continuing convergence between MCAD and ECAD. You should know first that Melika has a PhD in mechanical engineering and an extensive background in thermal engineering at Broadcom and Qualcomm, all very… Read More
Cadence Claims the CFD High Ground with a New GPU-Based Accelerator
For observers of EDA markets there is an easily overlooked opportunity for new growth. Today around 50% of EDA revenues come from systems rather than semiconductor companies, from datacenters to automotive, aerospace, energy, and others. In most of these industries total system design depends as much on mechanical and other… Read More
2023 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification
As usual in January we start with a look back at the papers we reviewed last year. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome. We’re planning on starting a live series… Read More
Information Flow Tracking at RTL. Innovation in Verification
Explicit and implicit sneak paths to leak or compromise information continue to represent a threat to security. This paper looks a refinement of existing gate level information flow tracking (IFT) techniques extended to RTL, encouraging early-stage security optimization. Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at … Read More
ML-Guided Model Abstraction. Innovation in Verification
Formal methods offer completeness in proving functionality but are difficult to scale to system level without abstraction and cannot easily incorporate system aspects outside the logic world such as in cyber-physical systems (CPS). Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst,… Read More
Cadence Integrates Power Integrity Analysis and Fix into Design
As integration levels increase, clock frequencies rise, and feature sizes shrink it is not surprising that all or most aspects of semiconductor design become more complex and demand more from design technologies. One example where the traditional approach is breaking down is in optimizing power distribution networks (PDNs)… Read More
Accelerating Development for Audio and Vision AI Pipelines
I wrote previously that the debate over which CPU rules the world (Arm versus RISC-V) somewhat misses the forest for the trees in modern systems. This is nowhere more obvious that in intelligent audio and vision: smart doorbells, speakers, voice activated remotes, intelligent earbuds, automotive collision avoidance, self-parking,… Read More