Next week is ARM TechCon which is one of my favorite conferences (SemiWiki is an event partner). This year is lucky number thirteen for ARM TechCon and it includes more than sixty hours of sessions plus more than one hundred ARM partners in the exposition. I will be signing free copies of our new book “Custom SoCs for IoT: Simplified”… Read More
Getting A Handle On Your Automotive SoCs For ISO 26262
When it comes to safety and automotive systems, ISO 26262 is the standard by which system vendors are judged. As with all things the devil is in the details. To be compliant to the standard, design teams must have a well-defined and rigorous design and validation process in place that copiously documents all the requirements of their… Read More
Emulation Methodology for Drones and Other Video-Intensive Multimedia SoCs
What do drones, augmented reality devices, and 4K UHD TV have in common? They all include complex system-on-chips (SoCs) that must encode and decode, in real-time, data for increasingly higher definition video content. Verifying that these SoC designs are functionally correct is quite complex, but they must also function efficiently… Read More
Verification Trends: 2016
Periodically Mentor does us all a big favor by commissioning a survey of verification engineers across the world to illuminate trends in verification. This is valuable not only to satisfy our intellectual curiosity but also to help convince managers and finance mandarins that our enthusiasm to invest in new methods and tools … Read More
Walden Rhines on the Automotive Electronics Landscape
Mentor President and CEO Walden Rhines gave a comprehensive overview of the automotive electronics landscape at the Mentor Integrated Electrical Solutions Forum (IESF) in Plymouth, Mich., this week. A key focal point of Rhines’ comments was the twin industry disruptors: EVs and AVs.
A Texas Instruments alum, Rhines described… Read More
High-Level Synthesis for Automotive SoCs
Some of the world’s most complex Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) are being developed for automotive applications. These SoCs have heterogeneous architectures with a variety of processors and accelerators that do real-time image processing for assisted and autonomous driving applications. The Bosch Visiontec team, in Sophia Antipolis,… Read More
Fusing CMOS IC and MEMS Design for IoT Edge Devices
In my 34 years in IC and EDA, it never ceases to amaze me as to how ingenious designers can be with what is given them. Mentor, a Siemens business, has released a wonderful white paper that is proof of this yet again. The white paper steps through how one of their customers, MEMSIC, used the Tanner tool suite to develop a combination CMOS… Read More
Project Management Tools for Analog IP Verification
Large SoC design teams typically have a cadre of project managers to oversee all facets of functional verification — e.g., specification, reviews, directed testbench development, automated (pseudorandom) testcase generation, HDL coverage measurement and reporting, and bug identification/tracking database management.… Read More
Why Open and Supported Interfaces Matter
Back in the early 1980’s during the nascent years of electronic design automation (EDA), I worked at Texas Instruments supporting what would become their merchant ASIC business. Back then, life was a bit different. The challenge we faced was to make our ASIC library available on as many EDA flows as we could to give as many users as… Read More
Automotive IC Design Requires a Unique EDA Tool Emphasis
Semiwiki readers are no doubt very familiar with the increasing impact of the automotive market on the semiconductor industry. The magnitude and complexity of the electronic systems that will be integrated into upcoming vehicle designs reflects the driver automation, safety, and entertainment features that are in growing… Read More