Adding color to the talks, Dr. Jeff Welser, VP and IBM Almaden Research Lab Director showed how AI and recent computing resources could be harnessed to contain data explosion. Unstructured data growth by 2020 would be in the order of 50 Zetta-bytes (with 21 zeros). One example, the Summit supercomputer developed by IBM for use at… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Don’t Stand Between The Anonymous Bug and Tape-Out (Part 2 of 2)
The second panel is about system coverage and big data. Coverage metrics have been used to gauge the quality of verification efforts during development. At system level, there are still no standardized metrics to measure full coverage. The emergence of PSS, better formal verification, enhanced emulation and prototyping techniques… Read More
Machine Learning Neural Nets and the On-Chip Network
Machine learning (ML), and neural nets (NNs) as a subset of ML, are blossoming in all sorts of applications, not just in the cloud but now even more at the edge. We can now find them in our phones, in our cars, even in IoT applications. We have all seen applications for intelligent vision (e.g. pedestrian detection) and voice recognition… Read More
Don’t Stand Between The Anonymous Bug and Tape-Out (Part 1 of 2)
In the EDA space, nothing seems to be more fragmented in-term of solutions than in the Design Verification (DV) ecosystem. This was my apparent impression from attending the four panel sessions plus numerous paper presentations given during DVCon 2018 held in San Jose. Both key management and technical leads from DV users community… Read More
ARM and embedded SIM
It seems that a hot ticket at Mobile World Congress this year was embedded SIM announcements. As a reminder of why this space is hot, cellular communication for provisioning and data uploads is a very real option for many IoT devices. In agricultural, smart energy and asset tracking applications for example, near-range options… Read More
Connecting Coherence
If a CPU or CPU cluster in an SoC is the brain of an SoC, then the interconnect is the rest of the central nervous system, connecting all the other processing and IO functions to that brain. This interconnect must enable these functions to communicate with the brain, with multiple types of memory, and with each other as quickly and predictably… Read More
The hierarchical architecture of an embedded FPGA
The most powerful approach to managing the complexity of current SoC hardware is the identification of hierarchical instances with which to assemble the design. The development of the hierarchical design representation requires judicious assessment of the component definitions. The goals for clock distribution, power … Read More
An AI assist for 5G enhanced Mobile Broadband for mobile platforms
If you’re not up-to-speed on 5G, there are three use-cases: eMBB(enhanced mobile broadband) for mobile platforms (Gbps rates, immersive gaming, VR, AR – spectrum usage also extends up to mmWave, but that’s a different topic), mMTCfor massive machine type communication (ultra-low cost, ultra-low power, very dense networks)… Read More
A Development Lifecycle Approach to Security Verification
We have become accustomed to the idea that safety expectations can’t be narrowed down to one thing you do in design. They pervade all aspects of design from overall process through analysis, redundancies in design, fault analytics and mitigation for faults and on-board monitors for reliability among other requirements and techniques.… Read More
Securing embedded SIMs
If you have a phone, you probably know it has a SIM card, for most of us the anchor that ties us into a 2/3-year plan with one network provider, unless you have an unlocked phone. Even then, you have to mess around swapping SIM cards if you travel overseas. Wouldn’t it be nice if the SIM was embedded and could be switched though an app or an… Read More


Quantum Computing Technologies and Challenges