You may have noticed that I have been writing a lot more about analog design lately. This is no accident. Analog and custom blocks are increasingly important because of the critical role they play in enabling many classes of systems, such as automotive, networking, wireless, mobile, cloud, etc. Many of the SoCs needed for these… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
ML-Based Coverage Refinement. Innovation in Verification
We’re always looking for ways to leverage machine-learning (ML) in coverage refinement. Here is an intriguing approach proposed by Google Research. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research… Read More
Visual Debug for Formal Verification
Success with Open-Source Formal Verification
The dream of 100% confidence is compelling for silicon engineers. We all want that big red button to push that magically finds all of our bugs for us. Verification, after all, accounts for roughly two-thirds of logic design effort. Without that button, we have to create reference models,… Read More
White Paper: Advanced SoC Debug with Multi-FPGA Prototyping
S2C EDA recently released a whitepaper written by a good friend of mine Steve Walters. Steve and I have worked together many times throughout our careers and I consider him to be one of my trusted few, especially in regards to prototyping and emulation. Steve is also my co author on the book “Prototypical II The Practice of FPGA-Based… Read More
Power Transistor Modeling for Converter Design
Voltage converters and regulators are a vital part of pretty much every semiconductor-based product. They play an outsized role in mobile devices such as cell phones where there are many subsystems operating at different voltages with different power needs. Many portable devices rely on Lithium Ion batteries whose output voltage… Read More
Bespoke Silicon is Coming, Absolutely!
It was nice to be at a live conference again. DesignCon was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, my favorite location, which to me there was a back to normal crowd. The sessions I attended were full and the show floor was busy. Masks and vaccinations were not required, maybe that was it. Or there was a pent-up demand to get back engaged… Read More
WEBINAR: How to Improve IP Quality for Compliance
Establishing traceability is critical for many organizations — and a must for those who need to prove compliance. Too often, the compliance process is manual, leading to errors and even delays. A simple clerical mistake can invalidate results and lead to larger issues throughout the product’s lifecycle. Developing a unified,… Read More
ISO 26262: Feeling Safe in Your Self-Driving Car
The word “safety” can mean a lot of different things to different people, but it’s a word we hear frequently when the topic involves automobiles. In contrast, “functional safety” has a long-established meaning in the design of electrical and mechanical systems: an automatic protection mechanism with a predictable response … Read More
Design to Layout Collaboration Mixed Signal
When talking about today’s sophisticated advanced node designs it’s easy to first think about the digital challenges. Yet, the effort to design the needed analog and mixed signal blocks for them should not be underestimated. The need for high speed clocks, high frequency RF circuits and high bit rate IOs makes the analog portions,… Read More
Synopsys Tutorial on Dependable System Design
Synopsys hosted a tutorial on the last day of DVCon USA 2022 on design/system dependability. Which here they interpret as security, functional safety, and reliability analysis. The tutorial included talks from DARPA, AMD, Arm Research and Synopsys. DARPA and AMD talked about general directions and needs, Arm talked about their… Read More


An AI-Native Architecture That Eliminates GPU Inefficiencies