It is pretty common for physical layout to work from a flattened hierarchy for blocks or even full chips, even though the front-end design starts with a hierarchical representation. This was not always the case. Way back when, the physical layout matched the logical hierarchy during the design process. Of course, this led to all… Read More
Mentor-Tanner Illuminate MEMS Sensing, Fusion
I enjoy learning and writing about new technologies closely connected to our personal and working lives (the kind you could explain to your Mom or a neighbor). So naturally I’m interested in AI, communication and security as applied to the home automation, transportation, virtual, augmented and mixed reality, industry and so… Read More
Mentor Highlights HLS Customer Use in Automotive Applications
I’ve talked before about Mentor’s work in high-level synthesis (HLS) and machine learning (ML). An important advantage of HLS in these applications is its ability to very quickly adapt and optimize architecture and verify an implementation to an objective in a highly dynamic domain. Design for automotive applications – for … Read More
PSS and Reuse: Great Solution But Not Hands-Free
If you’re new to PSS you could be forgiven for thinking that it automagically makes stimulus reusable, vertically from IPs to systems, horizontally between derivatives and between hardware-based and software-based testing. From a big-picture point of view these are certainly all potential benefits of PSS.
What PSS does provide… Read More
Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++
In the early days of chip design circa 1970’s the engineers would write logic equations, then manually reduce that logic using Karnaugh Maps. Next, we had the first generation of logic synthesis in the early 1980’s, which read in a gate-level netlist, performed logic reduction, then output a smaller gate-level netlist.… Read More
An AI Accelerator Ecosystem For High-Level Synthesis
AI accelerators as engines for object or speech recognition (among many possibilities), are becoming increasingly popular for inference in mobile and power-constrained applications. Today much of this inferencing runs largely in software on CPUs or GPUs thanks to the sheer size of the smartphone market, but that will shift… Read More
#56thDAC Discussion on Calibre in the Cloud Brings Sunshine to SOC Developers
It was inevitable that EDA applications would meet the cloud. EDA has a long history of creating some of the most daunting compute challenges. This arises from employing current generation chips to design the next generation chips. Despite growing design complexity, many tools have kept pace and even reduced runtimes from generation… Read More
#56DAC – Functional Safety Panel hosted by Mentor
Four experts in the discipline of functional safety were gathered together at #56DAC in Vegas earlier in June, hosted at the Mentor booth, so I rested my legs and typed notes as fast as I could. The product areas that I first think about when functional safety (FuSa) comes up are automotive, medical and aerospace, because keeping… Read More
Siemens Shows SOC Simulation Solution for Self-Driving Vehicles
Ever since the early days of computing there has always been a large distinction between ‘regular’ computing and real time computing – where special care had to be made to deal with unordered and asynchronous events. Back then a system typically consisted of a handful of sensors and perhaps some electromechanical devices.… Read More
Mentor Excitement at 56thDAC!
Mentor continues to invest in conferences such as DAC, no matter the location, for which I am very grateful. They have a long list of activities this year but I wanted to point out my top three:
Wally Rhines has a talk in the DAC Pavilion which is first on the list. Wally’s expert industry perspective is the result of tireless research… Read More