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
Mentor Automating Design Compliance with Power-Aware Simulation HyperLynx and Xpedition Flow
High-speed design requires addressing signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) challenges. Power integrity has a frequency component. The Power Distribution Network (PDN) in designs has 2 different purposes: providing power to the chip, and acting as a power plane reference for transmission-line like propagating … Read More
Verifying Software Defined Networking
I’ve designed hardware and written software for decades now, so it comes as no surprise to see industry trends like Software Defined Radio (SDR) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) growing in importance. Instead of designing a switch with fixed logic you can use an SDN approach to allow for greatest flexibility, even … Read More
Accelerating Post-Silicon Debug and Test
The recent growing complexity in SoC designs attributed to the increased use of embedded IP’s for more design functionalities, has imposed a pressing challenge to the post-silicon bring-up process and impacting the overall product time-to-market.
According to data from Semico Research, more than 60% of design starts contain… Read More