Nowadays, verification as one of the most complex SoC, FPGA, and ASIC development flow stages always requires new approaches. The following is an introduction to TcL vs/ with SystemVerilog and VHDL, the first in a 3 part series. Part 2 will be “Tcl vs Python, Bluespec” and part 3 will be “VerTcl description”.… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Moving with Purpose for Certainty
In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain towards west on Atlantic Ocean in search of Asia and Indies. Between his four voyages (1492 – 1502) he discovered many different islands and then what we call Americas. Although he had a compass with him, imagine searching a needle in a haystack. Even with localization of areas and then… Read More
Cellular Meets IoT in Qualcomm’s New LTE Push
Qualcomm buckles up for 4G machine communications and the technologies it has picked hint on the most likely winners in the crowded space of the Internet of Things (IoT) standards for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.… Read More
Will the Snapdragon 820 Overheat?
So, I happened to read an article today about overheating issues on the snapdragon 820 from rather flaky sources. To guess the answer to this question, one has to understand the snapdragon 810 “heat-gate” and the sequence of events that led to it.… Read More
How to Live with Rapid Changes During Early Development of IP
Best practices call for using a version control system with systematic releases when developing IP. However, in the early stages of IP development using a rigid version control system with a cumbersome release process can hinder productivity. To fully understand how this works we should start by defining what is meant when we … Read More
How Can Big Data and EDA Tools Help?
Big data is a headline phrase that I see appear almost weekly now in my newsfeed, so it’s probably time that I start paying more attention to the growing trend because it does impact how technology-driven, EDA tool flows are being used. From my last trip to DAC I recall only two companies that were really focused on system-level… Read More
Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?
Macbeth may have been uncertain of what he saw but, until recently, image recognition systems would have fared even less well. The energy and innovation put into increasingly complex algorithms always seemed to fall short of what any animal (including us humans) is able to do without effort. Machine vision algorithms have especially… Read More
Shifting Low Power Verification to an IP to SoC Flow
One of the most exciting recent developments in low power design and verification is the successive refinement flow developed by ARM® and Mentor Graphics®.… Read More
SpyGlass World 2015 User Group Meeting
I attended SpyGlass World this week – to give you an update, to catch up with old friends, including users, and to meet some of the new (to me) players from the Synopsys side of the event. The event was held in the United Club at Levi stadium, just like last year. Don’t know if this will continue. Merging the SpyGlass User Group into SNUG… Read More
Free Copy of EDAgraffiti!
Last month we offered a free PDF version of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”, for the greater good. More than thirteen thousand people have downloaded it thus far so we would like to keep the momentum going with another book giveaway. Paul McLellan has graciously offered his book… Read More
Can RISC-V Help Recast the DPU Race?