Synopsys hosted a lunch panel on Tuesday of DAC this year, in which verification leaders from Intel, Qualcomm, Wave Computing, NXP and AMD talked about how they are using Synopsys verification technologies. Panelists covered multiple domains but the big takeaway for me was their full-throated endorsement of the ZeBu emulation… Read More
A Functional Safety Primer for FPGA – and the Rest of Us
Once in a while I come across a vendor-developed webinar which is so generally useful it deserves to be shared beyond the confines of sponsored sites. I don’t consider this spamming – if you choose you can ignore the vendor-specific part of the webinar and still derive significant value from the rest. In this instance, the topic is… Read More
Checking Clock Gating Equivalence the Easy Way
Synopsys just delivered a Webinar on using the sequential equivalence app (SEQ) in their VC Formal product to check that clock-gating didn’t mess up the functional intent of your RTL. This webinar is one in a series on VC Formal, designed to highlight the wide range of capabilities Synopsys has to offer in formal verification. They… Read More
Synopsys New EV6x Offers 4X More Performance to CNN
When Synopsys bought Virage Logic in 2010, ARC processor IP was in the basket, but at that time ARC processor core was not the most powerful on the market, and by far. The launch of EV6x vision processor sounds like Synopsys has moved ARC processor core by several orders of magnitude in term of processing power. EV6x deliver up to 4X … Read More
LETI Days 2017: FD-SOI, Sensors and Power to Sustain Auto and IoT
I have attended last week to the LETI Days in Grenoble, lasting two days to mark the 50[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary of the CEA subsidiary. Attending to the LETI Days is always a rich experience: LETI is a research center counting about 3000 research engineers, but LETI is also a start-up nursery. The presentations are ranging from … Read More
Webinar: Synopsys on Clock Gating Verification with VC Formal
Clock gating is arguably the mostly widely-used design method to reduce power since it is broadly applicable even when more sophisticated methods like power islands are ruled out. But this style can be fraught with hazards even for careful designers. When you start with a proven-correct logic design and add clock gating, the logic… Read More
ARM, Infineon, Synopsys, SK Hynix talk AMS Simulation
Every SoC that connects to an analog sensor or device requires AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal) circuit simulation for design and verification, so this year at #54DAC the organizers at Synopsys hosted another informative AMS panel session over lunch time on Monday. What makes this kind of panel so refreshing is that the invited speakers… Read More
Accurate Power Sooner
Synopsys PrimeTime PX, popularly known as PT-PX, is widely recognized as the gold standard for power signoff. Calculation is based on a final gate-level netlist reflecting final gate selections and either approximate interconnect parasitics or final parasitics based on the post-layout netlist. The only way to get more accurate… Read More
CCIX Protocol Push PCI Express 4.0 up to 25G
The CCIX consortium has developed the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (X) protocol. The goal is to support cache coherency, allowing faster and more efficient sharing of memory between processors and accelerators, while utilizing PCIe 4.0 as transport layer. With Ethernet, PCI Express is certainly the most popular… Read More
An InFormal Chat
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as the saying goes. Which is all very well when the purpose is entertainment or serving the arcane skills of a select priesthood, but it’s not a good way to grow a market. Then you want to dispel the magic aura, make the basic mechanics more accessible to a wider… Read More

