Agile methods in hardware design are becoming topical again. What does this mean for verification? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence) and I continue our series on research ideas. We’re also honored this month to welcome Raúl Camposano to our blog as a very distinguished replacement for Jim Hogan. As always, feedback… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Small EDA Company with Something New: SoC Compiler
I read the semiconductor press, LinkedIn and social media (Twitter, Facebook) every morning along with an RSS feed that I setup, staying current on everything related to using EDA tools to make the task of SoC design a bit easier for design teams. A recent press release announced a tool called SoC Compiler, so my curiosity was piqued… Read More
PCIe 6.0 Doubles Speed with New Modulation Technique
PCI-SIG has held to doubling PCIe’s data rate with each revision of the specification. The consortium of 800 companies, with its board consisting of Agilent, AMD, Dell, HP, Intel, Synopsys, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, is continuing this trend with the PCIe 6.0 specification which calls for a transfer rate of 64 GT/s. PCI-SIG released… Read More
Embedded Analytics Becoming Essential
SoC integration offers huge benefits through reduced chip count in finished systems, higher performance, improved reliability, etc. A single die can contain billions of transistors, with multiple processors and countless subsystems all working together. The result of this has been rapid growth of semiconductor content … Read More
Addressing SoC Test Implementation Time and Costs
In business we all have heard the maxim, “Time is Money.” I learned this lesson early on in my semiconductor career when doing DRAM design, discovering that the packaging costs and time on the tester were actually higher than the fabrication costs. System companies like IBM were early adopters of Design For Test (DFT)… Read More
Your Car Is a Smartphone on Wheels—and It Needs Smartphone Security
Your modern car is a computer on wheels—potentially hundreds of computers on a set of wheels. Heck, even the wheels are infested with computers—what do you think prompts that little light on your dashboard to come on if your tire pressure is low? And computers don’t just run your infotainment system, backup camera, dashboard warning
Why I made the world’s first on-demand formal verification course
Verification Challenge
As chip design complexity continues to grow astronomically with hardware accelerators running riot with the traditional hardware comprising CPUs, GPUs, networking and video and vision hardware, concurrency, control and coherency will dominate the landscape of verification complexity for safe … Read More
Podcast EP16: Hyperscale Computing & Changes in the Datacenter
Dan is joined by Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director of solutions marketing at Cadence Design Systems, Frank has extensive experience in complex system design from his work at companies such as Cadence, Synopsys, Imperas and ChipVision. He has also advised Vayavya Labs and CriticalBlue.
Dan and Frank discuss the many… Read More
Global Variation and Its Impact on Time-to-Market for Designs
We have come a long way from the days of limited and manageable characterization databases with fewer views and smaller library sizes. The technologies we are headed towards pushing characterization to its limits with special modeling for variation, aging and reliability all on a single process, voltage and temperature (PVT).… Read More
Siemens EDA Updates, Completes Its Hardware-Assisted Verification Portfolio
Siemens EDA’s Veloce emulation products are long-established and worthy contenders in any emulation smack-down. But there was always a hole in the complete acceleration story. Where was the FPGA prototyper? Current practice requires emulation for fast simulation with hardware debug, plus prototyping for faster simulation… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki