There is an interesting white paper out from Mentor on how a customer used the Solido Varation Designer tool to reduce Monte Carlo simulations. As you may know I worked for Solido for 10+ years up until they were acquired by Mentor in December of 2017. It was an incredible personal and professional experience. I have the highest respect… Read More
Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited
I believe I asked this question a year or two ago and answered it for the absolute bleeding edge of datacenter performance – Google TPU and the like. Those hyperscalars (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, etc) who want to do on-the-fly recognition in pictures so they can tag friends in photos, do almost real-time machine… Read More
The Moving Target Known as UPF
As if engineers did not have enough difficulty just getting everything right so that their designs are implemented functionally correct, the demands of lowering power consumption require changes that can affect functionality and verification. Techniques such as power gating, clock gating, mixed supply voltage, voltage … Read More
What a Difference an Architecture Makes: Optimizing AI for IoT
Last week Mentor hosted a virtual event on designing an AI accelerator with HLS, integrating it together with an Arm Corstone SSE-200 platform and characterizing/optimizing for performance and power. Though in some ways a recap of earlier presentations, there were some added insights in this session, particularly in characterizing… Read More
WEBINAR: Moving UVM Verification Up To The Next Level
Tom Fitzpatrick, a Strategic Verification Architect at Mentor, a Siemens Business, has worked on IEEE and Accellera standards like Verilog 1364, System Verilog 1800, UVM 1800.2 and is Vice Chair of the Portable Stimulus working group, so when I heard that he was doing a webinar on how PSS can be used to create better stimulus for … Read More
High Speed SerDes Design and Simulation Webinar Replay from Mentor
Over the years SerDes (serializer/deserializer) based connections have proliferated into just about every connection within and among computing systems. Years ago, parallel interfaces were the most common method of moving data, but issues of signal integrity, synchronization and power simply became too much for the required… Read More
DFT Innovations Come from Customer Partnerships
There is an adage that says that quality is not something that can be slapped on at the end of the design or manufacturing process. Ensuring quality requires careful thought throughout development and production. Arguably this adage is more applicable to the topic of Design for Test (DFT) than almost any other area of IC development… Read More
Linux for Medical Devices Q&A
As I have mentioned before SemiWiki gets to meet some very smart people and here is another one. Scot Morrison has an MS degree in Aerospace Engineering from MIT specializing in control systems. Today he is the general manager of the Embedded Platform Solutions Division at Mentor, a Siemens business. Scot oversees the Linux®, Nucleus®,… Read More
Slash Tapeout Times with Calibre in the Cloud
I’ve spent many years in the ASIC business, and I’ve seen my share of complex chip tapeouts. All of these projects share one important challenge – compute requirements explode when you get close to the finish line. Certain tools need to run on the full-chip layout for final verification and the run times for those tools can get excessively… Read More
Radiation Tolerance. Not Just for ISO 26262
Years before ISO 26262 (the auto safety standard) existed, a few electronics engineers had to worry about radiation hardening, but not for cars. Their concerns were the same we have today – radiation-induced single event effects (SEE) and single event upsets (SEU). SEEs are root-cause effects – some form of radiation, might be… Read More