We have come a long way from the days of limited and manageable characterization databases with fewer views and smaller library sizes. The technologies we are headed towards pushing characterization to its limits with special modeling for variation, aging and reliability all on a single process, voltage and temperature (PVT).… Read More
How PCI Express 6.0 Can Enhance Bandwidth-Hungry High-Performance Computing SoCs
What do genome sequencing, engineering modeling and simulation, and big data analytics have in common? They’re all bandwidth-hungry applications with complex data workloads. High-performance computing (HPC) systems deliver the parallel processing capabilities to generate detailed and valuable insights from these applications.
VC Formal SIG Virtually Conferences in Europe
Pratik Mahajan, Synopsys VC Formal R&D Group Director, kicked off an absorbing event featuring talks from multiple customers in Europe. He spent some time on formal signoff, an important topic that I’m still not sure is fully understood. Answering the questions “OK, we did a bunch of formal checking but how does that affect… Read More
Why In-Memory Computing Will Disrupt Your AI SoC Development
Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms thirsting for higher performance per watt have driven the development of specific hardware design techniques, including in-memory computing, for system-on-chip (SoC) designs. In-memory computing has predominantly been publicly seen in semiconductor startups looking to disrupt… Read More
Using IP Interfaces to Reduce HPC Latency and Accelerate the Cloud
IDC has forecasted that over the next five years, the Global Datasphere — the amount of data that’s created, transferred over the network and stored each year — will increase by over 3X to 175 zettabytes (Figure 1). Much of this is driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), video applications (including video streaming,… Read More
USB 3.2 Helps Deliver on Type-C Connector Performance Potential
Despite sounding like a minor enhancement version for USB, USB 3.2 introduces many important changes for the USB specification. To see where USB has come from and where it is going, it is essential to look at what is found in USB 3.2. The other salient point is that now the Type-C connector has split out from the underlying USB specification… Read More
Key Requirements for Effective SoC Verification Management
Effective and efficient functional verification is one of the biggest hurdles for today’s large and complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The goal is to verify as close as possible to 100% of the design’s specified functionality before committing to the long and expensive tape-out process for application-specific integrated… Read More
Synopsys is Enabling the Cloud Computing Revolution
In 2019 I was involved in a major project to move all our engineering and financial systems to the cloud. We succeeded in this endeavor, but it wasn’t easy. We faced a lot of infrastructure challenges during our journey. The freedom from facility management and capital budgeting offered by the cloud was significant, however. If … Read More
Techniques and Tools for Accelerating Low Power Design Simulations
I recently watched a webinar titled “How to accelerate power-aware simulation debug with Synopsys’ VC LP” that was presented by Ashwani Kumar Dwivedi senior applications engineer at Synopsys. Watching the webinar made me reminisce how design verification has evolved over the years. A long time ago, static verification started… Read More
Synopsys Delivers a Brief History of AI chips and Specialty AI IP
Let’s face it, AI is everywhere. From the cloud to the edge to your pocket, there is more and more embedded intelligence fueling efficiency and features. It’s sometimes hard to discern where human interaction ends, and machine interaction begins. The technology that underlies all this is quite complex and daunting to understand.… Read More