Every industry has famous thought leaders that can summarize where we’ve been and then paint a picture of where we’re headed towards in the future. Often they make statements that become industry expressions, like “Moore’s Law” or the “Internet of Things”. I think that if Synopsys… Read More
More knowledge, less time in FPGA-based prototyping
I recently published a post on LinkedIn titled “Sometimes, you gotta throw it all out” in reference to the innovation process and getting beyond good to better. A prime example has crossed my desk: the new ProtoCompiler software for Synopsys HAPS FPGA-based prototyping systems.
Last week, I spoke with Troy Scott, product marketing… Read More
Sebastian Thrun: Self-driving cars, MOOCs, Google Glass and more
Sebastian Thrun gave a fascinating keynote at SNUG last week. It didn’t have that much to do with IC design but he discussed 3 projects that he had been involved with. Anyone would be happy to have just one of these projects on their resume but he has all these (and more).
The first is the Google self-driving car. This project actually… Read More
SNUG and IC Compiler II
I have been at SNUG for the last couple of days. The big announcement is IC Compiler II. It was a big part of Aart’s keynote and Monday lunch featured all the lead customers talking about their experience with the tool.
The big motivation for IC Compiler II was to create a fully multi-threaded physical design tool that will scale… Read More
AMS Verification and Regression Testing of SoC Designs
Digital verification engineers on SoC designs have adopted many techniques to help ensure first silicon success: using compiled simulators, constrained random test, simulation farms, SystemVerilog methodology, and self-checking testbenches. AMS verification has tended to be ad-hoc or sharply divided into separate analog… Read More
IC Implementation Tool Gets a Rewrite, Now 10X Faster
EDA start-up companies often have the advantage over established vendors by being able to start from scratch, instead of having to maintain some legacy code that no longer is competitive. But what happens when the established vendor decides to rewrite their IC implementation tools from scratch? In this case it’s good news,… Read More
Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler
Integration is often an underrated attribute of good tools, compared to raw performance and technology. But these days integration is differentiation (try telling that to your calculus teacher). Today at DVCon Synopsys announced Verification Compiler which integrates pretty much all of Synopsys’s verification technologies… Read More
Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3
Since Synopsys acquired Eve over a year ago, they haven’t announced anything new in the ZeBu product line. Emulators are not like software where you expect incremental releases a couple of times per year, each new “release” is a complete re-design using new hardware fabric in a new process technology. Earlier… Read More
Synopsys Acquires Coverity
Synopsys announced this afternoon that they are acquiring Coverity for $375M subject to all the usual reviews.
There are a couple of other big EDA connections. Aki Fujimora, who was CTO of Cadence, is on the board. And Adreas Kuehlmann is the VP of R&D. He used to run Cadence Berkeley Laboratories before moving to the other end… Read More
Update on AMS Verification at DVcon
Digital verification of SoCs is a well-understood topic and there’s a complete methodology to support it, along with many EDA vendor tools. On the AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal) side of the design world life is not so easy, mostly because there are no clear standards to follow.
To gain some clarity into AMS verification I spoke… Read More