Teams buy HDL simulation for best bang for the buck. Teams buy hardware emulation for the speed. We’ve talked previously about SCE-MI transactors as a standardized vehicle to connect the two approaches to get the benefits of both in an accelerated testbench – what else should be accounted for?… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Statistical Simulation Provides Insight into 6T SRAM Optimization
ARM’s Azeez Bhavnagarwala recently gave a talk hosted by Solido on the benefits of variation aware design in optimizing 6T bit cells. Azeez sees higher clock rates, increasing usage of SRAM per processor and the escalating number of processors, shown in the diagram below, as trends that push designers toward 6T. Six Transistor… Read More
The Perfect Wearable SoC…?
Power is Everything
During Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank in the service module exploded forcing the crew to use the lunar module as a life boat to get back home, John Aaron – an incredibly gifted NASA engineer who was tasked with getting the Apollo 13 crew back home safely – flatly stated “Power is everything…we’ve… Read More
Did My FPGA Just Fail?
Designing DRAMs at Intel back in the 1970s I first learned about Soft Errors and the curious effect of higher failure rates of DRAM chips in Denver, Colorado with a higher altitude than Aloha, OR. With the rapid growth of FPGA-based designs in 2016, we are still asking the same questions about the reliability of our chips used for safety-critical… Read More
A New Player in the Functional Verification Space
Israel has a strong pedigree in functional verification. Among others, Verisity (an early contributor to class-based testbench design and constrained random testing) started in Israel and RocketTick (hardware-based simulation acceleration), acquired more recently by Cadence, is based in Israel. So when I hear about an … Read More
More on HAPS hybrid prototyping for ARMv8 with Linaro
A few weeks ago we previewed a Synopsys webinar describing how they are linking the ARM Juno Development Platform with the HAPS-80 and HAPS ProtoCompiler environment. I’ve had a look at the archived event and have some additional thoughts.… Read More
The Package Assembly Design Kit (PADK)… the start of something big
Integrated wafer-level fanout (WLFO) packaging technology is emerging as a foundation for multi-die solutions. Mobile product applications require focus on both aggressive chip-to-chip interface performance, as well as the final package volume. Traditional multi-chip packages using PCB laminate substrates do not readily… Read More
Foundation IP for Automotive: so Stringent Quality Requirements!
The Automotive IC market is not the largest segment, but is certainly the segments expected to grow with the highest CAGR, with 10.8% from 2013 to 2018, according with IC Insights (January 2015). If you consider the pretty long concept/design to production cycle time (7 years or more) as well as the numerous segments just emerging… Read More
Optimization and verification wins in IoT designs
Designers tend to put tons of energy into pre-silicon verification of SoCs, with millions of dollars on the line if a piece of silicon fails due to a design flaw. Are programmable logic designers, particularly those working with an SoC such as the Xilinx Zynq, flirting with danger by not putting enough effort into verification?… Read More
Solido Saves Silicon with Six Sigma Simulation
When pushing the boundaries of power and performance in leading edge memory designs, yield is always an issue. The only way to ensure that memory chips will yield is through aggressive simulation, especially at process corners to predict the effects of variation. In a recent video posted on the Solido website, John Barth of Invecas… Read More


Quantum Computing Technologies and Challenges