Thanks to advanced hardware and software, smart vehicles are improving with every generation. Capabilities that once seemed far-off and futuristic—from automatic braking to self-driving at the very pinnacle—are now either standard or within reach. However, considering how vehicle architectures have continued to evolve,… Read More
Mars Perseverance Rover Features First Zoom Lens in Deep Space
On July 30, 2020, NASA launched the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, which is scheduled to land today. Perseverance has been deployed to Mars with a new mission: to search for evidence of past life and collect samples that will eventually be brought back to Earth by future missions.
Verification Management the Synopsys Way
Remember the days when verification meant running a simulator with directed tests? (Back then we just called them tests.) Then came static and formal verification, simulation running in farms, emulation and FPGA prototyping. We now have UVM, constrained random testing and many different test objectives (functional, power,… Read More
Synopsys Debuts Major New Analog Simulation Capabilities
Just prior to this year’s Synopsys User Group (SNUG) meeting, I had a call with Hany Elhak, Group Director of Product Management and Marketing at Synopsys, to talk about their latest announcements for analog simulation. Synopsys usually has big things to talk about each year around this time – this year is no exception. Hany… Read More
Accelerating Cache Coherence Verification
It would be nice if there were a pre-packaged set of assertions which could formally check all aspects of cache coherence in an SoC. In fact, formal checks do a very nice job for the control aspects of a coherent network. But that covers only one part of the cache coherence verification task. Dataflow checks are just as important, where… Read More
PCIe 6.0 Doubles Speed with New Modulation Technique
PCI-SIG has held to doubling PCIe’s data rate with each revision of the specification. The consortium of 800 companies, with its board consisting of Agilent, AMD, Dell, HP, Intel, Synopsys, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, is continuing this trend with the PCIe 6.0 specification which calls for a transfer rate of 64 GT/s. PCI-SIG released… Read More
Addressing SoC Test Implementation Time and Costs
In business we all have heard the maxim, “Time is Money.” I learned this lesson early on in my semiconductor career when doing DRAM design, discovering that the packaging costs and time on the tester were actually higher than the fabrication costs. System companies like IBM were early adopters of Design For Test (DFT)… Read More
Your Car Is a Smartphone on Wheels—and It Needs Smartphone Security
Your modern car is a computer on wheels—potentially hundreds of computers on a set of wheels. Heck, even the wheels are infested with computers—what do you think prompts that little light on your dashboard to come on if your tire pressure is low? And computers don’t just run your infotainment system, backup camera, dashboard warning
Global Variation and Its Impact on Time-to-Market for Designs
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.

