In verification there is an ever-popular question, “When can we stop verifying?” The intent behind the question is “when will we have found all the important bugs?” but the reality is that you stop verifying when you run out of time. Any unresolved bugs appear in errata lists delivered with the product (some running to 100 or more … Read More
What’s New with Cadence Virtuoso?
It was back in 1991 that Cadence first announced the Virtuoso product name, and here we are 32 years later and the product is alive and doing quite well. Steven Lewis from Cadence gave me an update on something new that they call Virtuoso Studio, and it’s all about custom IC design for the real world. In those 32 years we’ve… Read More
AI Assists PCB Designers
Generative AI is all the rage with systems like ChatGPT, Google Bard and DALL-E being introduced with great fanfare in the past year. The EDA industry has also been keen to adopt the trends of using AI techniques to assist IC engineers across many disciplines. Saugat Sen, Product Marketing at Cadence did a video call with me to explain… Read More
AI in Verification – A Cadence Perspective
AI is everywhere or so it seems, though often promoted with insufficient detail to understand methods. I now look for substance, not trade secrets but how exactly they using AI. Matt Graham (Product Engineering Group Director at Cadence) gave a good and substantive tutorial pitch at DVCon, with real examples of goal-centric optimization… Read More
Speculation for Simulation. Innovation in Verification
This is an interesting idea, using hardware-supported speculative parallelism to accelerate simulation, with a twist requiring custom hardware. Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on… Read More
Cadence Hosts ESD Alliance Seminar on New Export Regulations Affecting EDA and SIP March 28
Anyone interested in learning about general trade compliance concepts or how export control and sanction regulations affect the electronic systems design ecosystem will want to attend the upcoming ESD Alliance export seminar. It will be hosted by Ada Loo, chair of the ESD Alliance Export Committee and Cadence’s Group Director… Read More
ML-Based Coverage Acceleration. Innovation in Verification
We looked at another paper on ML-based coverage acceleration back in April 2022. Here is a different angle from IBM. Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/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… Read More
Dr. Anirudh Devgan Elected to The National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
Having known many of the top EDA CEOs during my semiconductor tenure the common traits I have found are brilliance, humility, endurance, and a sharp sense of humor. EDA solves so many problems, complex problem after complex problem, that it takes teams of incredibly smart people to solve them. Even more difficult is leading these… Read More
2022 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. And don’t forget to come see us at DVCon,… Read More
Validating NoC Security. Innovation in Verification
Network on Chip (NoC) connectivity is ubiquitous in SoCs, therefore should be an attractive attack vector. Is it possible to prove robustness against a broad and configurable range of threats? Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and… Read More