I recently wrote about Tensilica’s HiFi DSPs which played a significant role at Cadence’s Automotive Design Summit which was held on the Cadence San Jose campus at the end of July. That article focused on infotainment while briefly touching on Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS). ADAS is NOT synonymous with autopilot.… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Build More and Better Tests Faster
Breker has been in the system test synthesis game for 12 years, starting long before there was a PSS standard. Which means they probably have this figured out better than most, quite simply because they’ve seen it all and done it all. Breker is heavily involved in and aligned with the standard of course but it shouldn’t be surprising… Read More
Achieving Functional Safety through a Certified Flow
Functional safety (FuSa) is a big deal, especially when driving a car. My beloved 1998 Acura RL recently exhibited a strange behavior at 239K miles, after making a turn the steering wheel would stay tilted in the direction of the last turn instead of straightening out. The auto mechanic pinpointed the failure to the ball joints, … Read More
Speeding up Circuit Simulation using a GPU Approach
The old adage that “Time is Money” certainly rings true in the semiconductor world where IC designers are being challenged with getting their new designs to market quickly, and correctly in the first spin of silicon. Circuit designers work at the transistor-level, and circuit simulation is one of the most time-consuming… Read More
Making pre-Silicon Verification Plausible for Autonomous Vehicles
I love reading about the amazing progress of autonomous vehicles, like when Audi and their A8 model sedan was the first to reach Level 3 autonomy, closely followed by Tesla at Level 2, although Tesla gets way more media attention here in the US. A friend of mine bought his wife a car that offers adaptive cruise control with auto-braking,… Read More
Xilinx on ANSYS Elastic Compute for Timing and EM/IR
I’m a fan of getting customer reality checks on advanced design technologies. This is not so much because vendors put the best possible spin on their product capabilities; of course they do (within reason), as does every other company aiming to stay in business. But application by customers on real designs often shows lower performance,… Read More
Tensilica HiFi DSPs for What I Want to Hear, and What I Don’t Want to Hear
It seems every day we see a new article (or ten) on autonomous driving. It is an especially hot topic, and it will happen someday. For now, we can dream about it, and many people are working on it. But for the present, the technology in a car that commands my attention is audio. I’ve been a musician since 4th grade. I still perform occasionally… Read More
Can a hierarchical Test flow be used on a flat design?
It is pretty common for physical layout to work from a flattened hierarchy for blocks or even full chips, even though the front-end design starts with a hierarchical representation. This was not always the case. Way back when, the physical layout matched the logical hierarchy during the design process. Of course, this led to all… Read More
Mentor-Tanner Illuminate MEMS Sensing, Fusion
I enjoy learning and writing about new technologies closely connected to our personal and working lives (the kind you could explain to your Mom or a neighbor). So naturally I’m interested in AI, communication and security as applied to the home automation, transportation, virtual, augmented and mixed reality, industry and so… Read More
Accelerate Your Early Design Recon
A product launch nowadays demands shorter runway. SoC designers challenges are not so much in facing the unavailability of proven design capture methodologies or IP’s that could satisfy their product requirements, but more so in orchestrating the integration of all those components to deliver the targeted functionalities… Read More


Weebit Nano Reports on 2025 Targets