Walking across a carpet can generate up to 35,000 volts of static charge, which is tens of thousands of times higher than the operating voltages of most integrated circuits. When charge build up from static electricity is exposed to the pins of an IC, the electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection network on the chip is intended to… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Minimizing Power Consumption in Ultra Low Power MCU Based SoCs
When it comes to extremely power sensitive applications such as IoT and edge devices, there is literally an arsenal of power saving techniques that could be used. The tricky part is figuring out which ones to use and how to use them for maximum benefit. This is coupled with the need to not hamper device performance or functionality.… Read More
What a Difference an Architecture Makes: Optimizing AI for IoT
Last week Mentor hosted a virtual event on designing an AI accelerator with HLS, integrating it together with an Arm Corstone SSE-200 platform and characterizing/optimizing for performance and power. Though in some ways a recap of earlier presentations, there were some added insights in this session, particularly in characterizing… Read More
The Growing Relevance of IP-XACT in Today’s Complex Designs
The life of a SoC designer is an unenviable one. Not only does he have to work in a landscape where competition is intense but he also has to collaborate effectively with globally dispersed teams to ensure the design meets the project timeline. Then there are also the risks, more so in the current pandemic! There is the constant fear… Read More
The Largest Engineering Simulation Virtual Event in the World!
ANSYS is the world leader in engineering simulation across multiple markets. One of those markets just happens to be semiconductor which is why ANSYS is on SemiWiki.com. Due to the pandemic ANSYS has transformed their popular live regional events to one broad virtual event “Simulation World”.
“Simulation World is world’s largest… Read More
Synopsys Announces IP Supporting 5G’s Game Changing Low Power IoT Spec
If you are like me, you will get a 5G phone because of the high bandwidth it offers. However, there is a lot more to 5G than just fast data. In fact, one of the appealing features of 5G is low bandwidth communication. This is useful for edge devices that perform infrequent and low volume data transfers and depend on long battery life. Prior… Read More
Atos Crafts NoC, Pad Ring, More Using Defacto
I’ve talked before about how Defacto provides a platform for scripted RTL assembly. Kind of a rethink of the IP-XACT concept but without need to get into XML (it works directly with SV), and with a more relaxed approach in which you decide what you want to automate and how you want to script it.
They’re hosting a webinar on May 28th 10-11am… Read More
Collaboration Flow for Moore’s Law versus More than Moore
The current Coronavirus crisis is inflicting a lot of pain on people, companies, and governments. I hope I am not getting in trouble with my reasoning, but if you look closely, there are also some “positives” to the Covid-19 crisis.
– It is stress-testing our infrastructure and telling us where we need to improve – as country,… Read More
Is Mutation Testing Worth the Effort? Innovation in Verification
Mutation testing is an intriguing idea, but is it useful? Paul Cunningham (GM of Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas, here looking at a paper examining the pros and cons of this topic. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Which Software … Read More
HCL Offers Tightly Integrated Design Management Solution for Virtuoso
The road to a truly usable design management solution for electronic design has been a long and twisty one. Initially just handling EDA tool data was a struggle, let alone addressing mutli-user and multi-site needs. Of course, all along every EDA tool development company was internally using software revision control, which … Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?