Mentor are stepping up their game in AI/ML. They already had a well-established start through the Solido acquisition in Variation Designer and the ML Characterization Suite, and through Tessent Yield Insight. They have also made progress in prior releases towards supporting design for ML accelerators using Catapult HLS. Now… Read More
IC to Systems Era
One of my favorite EDA disruptions is the Siemens acquisition of Mentor, pure genius. Joe Sawicki now runs the Mentor IC EDA business for Siemens so we will be seeing him at more conferences and events than ever before. Joe did a very nice keynote at the recent U2U conference that I would like to talk about before we head to the 56thDAC… Read More
EDA Update 2019
Over the last six years EDA has experienced yet another disruption not unlike the Synopsys acquisition of Avant! in 2001 which positioned Synopsys for the EDA lead they still enjoy today. Or the hiring of famed venture capitalist Lip-Bu Tan in 2009 to be the CEO of struggling EDA pioneer Cadence Design Systems. Under Lip-Bu’s… Read More
Deep Learning, Reshaping the Industry or Holding to the Status Quo
AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and neural networks are all hot industry topics in 2019, but you probably want to know if these concepts are changing how we actually design or verify an SoC. To answer that question what better place to get an answer than from a panel of industry experts who recently gathered at DVcon with moderator… Read More
User2User Silicon Valley 2019
This will be one of the more interesting Mentor User Group Meetings now that the Siemens acquisition has fully taken effect and the new management team is in place. The Mentor User Conference is at the Santa Clara Marriott, Santa Clara, California on May 2, 2019 from 9:00 am to 6:00pm.
Remember, in 2017 Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics… Read More
A Collaborative Driven Solution
Last week TSMC announced the availability of its complete 5nm design infrastructure that enables SoC designers to implement advanced mobile and high-performance computing applications for the emerging 5G and AI driven markets. This fifth generation 3D FinFET design infrastructure includes technology files, PDKs (Process… Read More
Functional Verification using Formal on Million Gate Designs
Verification engineers are the unsung heroes making sure that our smart phone chips, smart watches and even smart cars function logically, without bugs or unintended behavior. Hidden bugs are important to uncover, but what approach is best suited for this challenge?
With the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) there’s… Read More
Hierarchical RTL Based ATPG for an ARM A75 Based SOC
Two central concepts have led to the growth of our ability to manage and implement larger and larger designs: hierarchy and higher levels of abstraction. Without these two approaches the enormous designs we are seeing in SOCs would not be possible. Hierarchy in particular allows the reuse of component blocks, such as CPU cores.… Read More
Surviving in the Age of Digitalization
There was an interesting keynote at DVCon last month. It was titled “Thriving in the Age of Digitalization” which introduced the concept of digital twins for design and production. It was presented by Fram Akiki who is a relative newcomer to EDA but has an interesting history so I will start there.
Fram and I got started in the semiconductor… Read More
Mentor Showcases Digital Twin Demo
Mentor put on a very interesting tutorial at DVCon this year. Commonly DVCon tutorials center around a single tool; less commonly (in my recent experience) they will detail a solution flow but still within the confines of chip or chip + software design. It is rare indeed to see presentations on a full system design including realistic… Read More