Approximately 25% of SemiWiki traffic originates from search engines and the key search terms are telling. Since the beginning of SemiWiki, “low power design” has been one of the top searches. This is understandable since the mobile market has been leading us down the path to fame and fortune. Clearly lowering the… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
UVM: Lowering the barrier to IP reuse
One of my acquaintances at Intel must have some of the same viewing habits I do, based on a recent Tweet he sent. He was probably watching “The Men Who Built America” on the History Channel and thinking as I have a lot recently about how the captains of industry managed to drive ideas to monopolies in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
… Read MoreDifference
Sanjiv Kaul is New CEO of Calypto
Calypto announced that Sanjiv Kaul is the new CEO. I first met Sanjiv many years ago when he was still at Synopsys when I interviewed for a position there around the time I transitioned out of Compass and went back to the parent company VLSI. I forget what the position was. Then about three or four years ago when I did some work for Oasys… Read More
Software Driven Power Analysis
Power is a fundamentally hard problem. When you have finished the design, you have accurate power numbers but can’t do anything about them. At the RTL level you have some power information but it is often too late to make major architectural changes (add an offload audio-processor, for example). Early in the design, making… Read More
Help, my IP has fallen and can’t get up
We’ve been talking about the different technologies for FPGA-based SoC prototyping a lot here in SemiWiki. On the surface, the recent stories all start off pretty much the same: big box, Xilinx Virtex-7, wanna go fast and see more of what’s going on in the design. This is not another one of those stories. I recently sat down with Mick… Read More
A Brief History of ClioSoft
In the 1990s, software developers were established users of software configuration management (SCM) tools such as open source RCS/CVS or of commercial systems such as Clearcase. Hardware designers, however, managed design data in ad hoc home-grown ways. ClioSoft’s founder, Srinath Anantharaman, recognized that hardware… Read More
Seeing inside SoC designs, from the beginning
Engineers have this fascination with how things work. They are thrilled to tear stuff apart, and sometimes to even be able to put it back together afterwords. So I can keep my recovering engineer card, I thought I’d take a few moments and look inside a technology Daniel Payne and I have been covering here, exploring where the idea started… Read More
Dynamic/Leakage Power Reduction in Memories
Embedded memories have an important impact on power. SoCs that integrate multiple functions on a single silicon die are at the heart of many electronic devices. As process geometries have scaled, design teams have used more and more of the additional silicon real estate available to integrate embedded memories that serve as scratch-pads,… Read More
TSMC ♥ Oasys
Oasys has joined the TSMC Soft-IP Alliance Program. This means that TSMC IP partners have access to a new RTL exploration tool to improve QoR and reduce the iterations needed for design closure. In modern process nodes, RTL engineers implementing complex IP cores for graphics, networking, and mobile computing are struggling … Read More
Building Energy-Efficient ICs from the Ground Up
My oldest son just upgraded Smart Phones from a 3″ display to a 4.5″ display and was shocked to discover that his battery barely lasted 8 hours, so I welcomed him to the reality of limited battery life in modern SoC-based mobile devices. There is some hope in increasing battery life for our consumer-oriented devices … Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification