You’re excited about the business potential for your cool new baby monitor, geo-fenced kid’s watch, home security system or whatever breakthrough app you want to build. You want to focus on the capabilities of the system, connecting it to the cloud and your marketing rollout plan. Then someone asks whether your system is architected… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
SiFive Unveils E2 Core IP Series for Smallest, Lowest Power RISC-V Designs
Fully configurable with advanced feature sets allows for broad applications, including microcontrollers, IoT, wearables, and smart cards
The E20 and E21 add to the growing list of SiFive RISC-V cores addressing the embedded controller, IoT, wearables, smart toys. On June 25, DAC opening day, SiFive announced the availability… Read More
Liberate Trio Embraces ML and Cloud
A chain is as strong as its weakest link. This phrase resonates well in Static Timing Analysis (STA) domain, though it is about accuracy rather than durability. As timing signoff step provides the final performance readings of a design, an STA outcome is as good as its underlying components. Aside from the parasitic extraction … Read More
DAC 2018 Potpourri
The venue
Despite of being held at the new three-story Moscone West building, this year 55th DAC in San Francisco bore many similarities as compared with last year’s. Similar booth decors and floorplan positioning of the big two, Synopsys and Cadence, which were across of each other and right next to the first floor entrance –although… Read More
Dragonfly-NB2: You Can Have It All in Your IoT Device
I wrote last month about CEVA’s Dragonfly-NB1 platform, a single-chip IoT solution supporting narrow-band cellular communication; this can meet aggressive total solution price-targets for high-volume deployment, long-range access and the low-power needed for 10+ year battery lifetimes. That solution, based on Release… Read More
RISC-V Ready (Tools) Set (Security) Go (Build)
The second Bay Area RISC-V Meetup event was held at the DoubleTree Hilton in Burlingame on June 19 with about 150 attendees. This event was hosted by SiFive and started with a networking session. The topics and speakers for the evening were:
- Commercial Software Tools – Larry Lapides, Imperas
- Securing RISC-V Processors –
7nm Networking Platform Delivers Data Center ASICs
We all know IP is critical for advanced ASIC design. Well-designed and carefully tested IP blocks and subsystems are the lifeblood of any advanced chip project. Those IP suppliers who can measure up to the need, especially at advanced process nodes, will do well, absolutely.
It is interesting to note that eSilicon now has a very … Read More
Leveraging AI to help build AI SOCs
When I first started working in the semiconductor industry back in 1982, I realized that there was a race going on between the complexity of the system being designed and the capabilities of the technology in the tools and systems used to design them. The technology used to design the next generation of hardware was always lagging… Read More
Achieving Clean Design Early with Calibre-RTD
Functional and physical verification are easily the two long poles in most IC product developments. During a design implementation cycle, design teams tend to push physical verification (PV) step towards the end as it is a time consuming process and requires significant manual interventions.
PV Challenges
In the traditional… Read More
The Starting Point of Functional Safety Analysis
In the course of building my understanding of functional safety, particularly with respect to ISO 26262, I have developed a better understanding of the design methods used to mitigate safety problems and the various tools and techniques that are applied to measure the impact of those diagnostics against ASIL goals. One area in… Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification