At the beginning of every project the one of the first questions that ought to be asked is whether there blocks from previous designs that can be reused. On the surface this seems pretty obvious. The wrinkle in this is that reusability varies a lot based on the design type and the effort that a team is willing to expend to bring a design… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Meeting the Challenges of National Defense Strategy
In February this year, the Department of Defense (DoD) submitted a $686.1 billions budget for 2019 and published a National Defense Strategy outlining the overall spending for defense and military programs. The recently signed US $1.3 trillion spending bill included part of the funding. According to DoD Defense Budget Overview… Read More
Edge Devices Rely on Intelligent MEMS Based Sensors
MEMS sensors play a huge role in intelligent systems these days. Mobile and IoT devices would essentially be blind if not for the rich variety of MEMS sensors integrated into them. The MEMS sensor market is growing rapidly, topping $10B in 2016 and slated to exceed $20B by 2020. MEMS is also growing in the RF market, where they are providing… Read More
The Future of Verification Management
One of the great aspects of modern hardware verification is that we keep adding new tools and methodologies to support different verification objectives (formal, simulation, real-number simulation, emulation, prototyping, UVM, PSS, software-driven verification, continuous integration, …). One of the downsides to this… Read More
Webinar: Fastest Lowest-Cost Route to Developing ARM based Mixed Signal SoCs
When it comes to building edge devices for the internet-of-things (IoT), you don’t want to have to break the bank to prototype an idea before diving into the deep water. At the same time, if your idea is to shrink an edge device down to it’s smallest dimensions, lowest power and lowest cost, you really want to be able to prototype your… Read More
A DVCon Tutorial on Advanced Formal Usage
Synopsys has been quite active lately in their messaging around formal verification. One such event at DVCon this year was a tutorial on some of the more advanced techniques/ methodologies that are accessible to formal teams, mostly presented by customers, though opened by a Synopsys presentation. The tutorial covered so many… Read More
Aart de Geus At the Heart of Impact!
At the Silicon Valley SNUG 2018, Synopsys Chairman and co-CEO Dr. Aart de Geuss gave his keynote speech addressing attendees on how far we have evolved, and at times encountered the aha factor that helps propel us to the next level. He explored trends as well as the current state of his company solution offerings.
Moore’s Law, Digital… Read More
FPGA, Data and CASPA: Spring into AI (2 of 2)
Adding color to the talks, Dr. Jeff Welser, VP and IBM Almaden Research Lab Director showed how AI and recent computing resources could be harnessed to contain data explosion. Unstructured data growth by 2020 would be in the order of 50 Zetta-bytes (with 21 zeros). One example, the Summit supercomputer developed by IBM for use at… Read More
Qualcomm, AMD on Verification with Synopsys
Synopsys hosts a regular lunch at DVCon each year (at least over the last few years I have checked), a nice meal and a show, opening a marketing update followed by 2-3 customer presentations on how they use Synopsys verification in their flows. This year’s event was moderated by Piyush Sancheti from Synopsys Verification marketing… Read More
Siemens Leverages Mentor Embedded IoT Framework for Industry 4.0
For those of you who wondered at the logic behind Siemens acquisition of Mentor Graphics last year, look no further than a recent announcement by Mentor, now a Siemens business, regarding the release of their new Mentor Embedded IoT Framework (MEIF). To help connect the dots, we need to back up a bit and review a few things about how… Read More


The Name Changes but the Vision Remains the Same – ESD Alliance Through the Years