When I was young, functional safety for automobiles consisted of checking tread depth and replacing belts and hoses before long trips. I’ll confess that this was a long time ago. Though even not that long ago, the only way you found out about failing systems was going to the mechanic and having them hook up a reader to the OBD port. Or,… Read More
Machine Learning Drives Transformation of Semiconductor Design
Machine learning is transforming how information processing works and what it can accomplish. The push to design hardware and networks to support machine learning applications is affecting every aspect of the semiconductor industry. In a video recently published by Synopsys, Navraj Nandra, Sr. Director of Marketing, takes… Read More
Worldwide Design IP Revenue Grew 12.4% in 2017
When starting SemiWiki we focused on three market segments: EDA, IP, and the Foundries. Founding SemiWiki bloggers Daniel Payne and Paul McLellan were popular EDA bloggers with their own sites and I blogged about the foundries so we were able to combine our blogs and hit the ground running. For IP I recruited Dr. Eric Esteve who had… Read More
IP Vendor Tuning of Your SoC A Practice for Design Success
On April 17, Mick Posner, Director of Product Marketing, IP Subsystems, Hardening & IP Kit solutions held a Webinar entitled ‘Getting more from your IP Vendor, IP Tuned to Your SoC’. This brought back memories of the challenges in days past of making the right choices in IP selection, integration and validation when prudence… Read More
Safety Critical Applications Require Onboard Aging Monitoring
When it comes to safety, ISO 26262 is the spec that comes to mind for many people. However, there are layers of specifications that enable the level of safety required for automotive and other systems that need high reliability. For any application requiring safety, test is a critical element. A key spec for SOC test is IEEE 1500, … Read More
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
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
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
Achieving ISO 26262 Certification with ASIL Ready IP
According with McKinsey, “analysts predict revenue growth for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to be up to 29 percent, giving the segment one of the highest growth rates in the automotive and related industries.” Design cycle in automotive segment is much longer than in segments like mobile, PC or consumer. If you expect… Read More
HDMI 2.1 Delivers 48.0 Gbps & Supports Dynamic HDR
You may or may not have bought HDMI-equipped device for black Friday or during year end break, but you TV set (or/and you PC) are certainly HDMI-powered, like the 750 million HDMI-equipped devices sold in 2016. In fact, cumulated shipment of HDMI-equipped devices has reached 6 BILLION since the protocol introduction in 2003! HDMI… Read More