Power integrity analysis in large chip designs is especially challenging thanks to the huge dynamic range the analysis must span. At one end, EM estimation and IR drop through interconnect and advanced transistor structures require circuit-level insight—very fine-grained insight but across a huge design. At the other, activity… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
The Quest for Bugs: Dilemmas of Hardware Verification
Functional Verification for complex ASICs or IP-Core products is a resource limited ‘quest’ to find as many bugs as possible before tape-out or release. It can be a long, difficult and costly search that is constrained by cost, time and quality. The search space is practically infinite, and 100% exhaustive verification is an unrealistic… Read More
Key Requirements for Effective SoC Verification Management
Effective and efficient functional verification is one of the biggest hurdles for today’s large and complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The goal is to verify as close as possible to 100% of the design’s specified functionality before committing to the long and expensive tape-out process for application-specific integrated… Read More
HCL Expands Cloud Choices with a Comprehensive Guide to Azure Deployment
HCL Compass is quite a powerful tool to accelerate project delivery and increase developer productivity. Last August I detailed a webinar about HCL Compass that will help you understand the benefits and impact of a tool like this. This technology falls into the category of DevOps, which aims to shorten the systems development … Read More
Finding Large Coverage Holes. Innovation in Verification
Is it possible to find and prioritize holes in coverage through AI-based analytics on coverage data? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Using Machine Learning Clustering To Find Large Coverage … Read More
Single HW/SW Bill of Material (BoM) Benefits System Development
Most large electronics companies take a divide and conquer approach to projects, with clear division lines set between HW and SW engineers, so quite often the separate teams have distinct methodologies and ways to design, document, communicate and save a BoM. This division can lead to errors in the system development process,… Read More
CEO Interview: Mark Williams of Pulsic
Pulsic recently announced its new “freemium” product Animate Preview and we had the chance to chat with Mark Williams, President and CEO of Pulsic. Mark explained details of the product and the new business model that could change the direction of the traditional EDA business model structure.
What brought you to the semiconductor… Read More
Synopsys is Enabling the Cloud Computing Revolution
In 2019 I was involved in a major project to move all our engineering and financial systems to the cloud. We succeeded in this endeavor, but it wasn’t easy. We faced a lot of infrastructure challenges during our journey. The freedom from facility management and capital budgeting offered by the cloud was significant, however. If … Read More
Arteris IP folds in Magillem. Perfect for SoC Integrators
Arteris IP and Magillem recently tied the knot, creating a merger of Network-on-Chip (NoC) and related Intellectual Property (IP) with a platform known for IP-XACT based SoC integration and related support. This is interesting to me because I’m familiar with products and people in both companies. I talked to Kurt Shuler, vice… Read More
Techniques and Tools for Accelerating Low Power Design Simulations
I recently watched a webinar titled “How to accelerate power-aware simulation debug with Synopsys’ VC LP” that was presented by Ashwani Kumar Dwivedi senior applications engineer at Synopsys. Watching the webinar made me reminisce how design verification has evolved over the years. A long time ago, static verification started… Read More


A Detailed History of Samsung Semiconductor