Arm provides great support for debugging embedded software in its CoreSight tools, but what support do you have if you’re debugging hardware and software together in a pre-implementation design? In a hardware debugger you have lots of support for hardware views like waveforms and register states. But these aren’t well connected… Read More





The Quest for Bugs: “Shift-Left, Right?”
Shift-left, why?
Shift-left testing is an approach to software and system testing which is performed earlier in the lifecycle (that is, moved left on the project timeline). It is the first half of the “Test early and often” maxim that was coined by Larry Smith in 2001.
It’s now an established idea, much talked about … Read More
On-the-Fly Code Checking Catches Bugs Earlier
There’s no question that chip designs are getting more complex, driven by the power, performance, and area (PPA) demands of applications like artificial intelligence (AI), automotive, and cloud computing. This complexity, of course, trickles down to the design and testbench code. When engineers can find and fix bugs before… Read More
Executable Specifications Shorten Embedded System Development
Even though AI is being used to replace procedural coding for many embedded applications, there is still, and will be for a long time, code that is written manually to deal with complicated inputs to control connected systems. Even in AI based systems there are programmer coded steps for responses to AI identified inputs. All of … Read More
Quantum Computing and Threats to Secure Communication
There is never a dearth of new terms, discoveries and inventions in the technological world. And sometimes existing terms get reinvigorated. And debates ensue. The debaters argue about the plusses and minuses and make some predictions. Such is the case with “Quantum Computing.” I recently watched and listened to a webinar that… Read More
Podcast EP32: Improving the Security of Hardware Designs
Dan is joined by Dr. Alric Altoff, senior hardware security engineer at Tortuga Logic. The security risks associated with speculative execution are discussed along with scalable methods to address these risks.
Dr. Alric Altoff has over 15 years of experience in hardware security, hardware/software co-design, and applied … Read More
Extreme Optics Innovation with Ansys SPEOS, Powered by NVIDIA GPUs
Optical engineers rely on Ansys SPEOS to deliver extreme product innovation — and NVIDIA dramatically accelerates the development cycle
Product autonomy, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other challenging trends are placing new demands on optical engineers in the automotive, aerospace and general… Read More
Stochastic Effects from Photon Distribution Entropy in High-k1 EUV Lithography
Recent advances in EUV lithography have largely focused on “low-k1” imaging, i.e., features with pitches less than the wavelength divided by the numerical aperture (k1<0.5). With a nominal wavelength of 13.5 nm and a numerical aperture of 0.33, this means sub-40 nm pitches. It is naturally expected that larger… Read More
Security Hot Again in the Venture World
From a lowly perspective in the hardware world, VCs can seem like magpies. Overly fascinated with bright, shiny ideas of questionable value. Stratospheric valuations and a quick exit that have the rest of us scratching our heads. What difference is this going to make beyond minting a few new billionaires? Why not, say, have security… Read More
Upcoming Virtual Event: Designing a Time Interleaved ADC for 5G V2X Automotive Applications
Over the last decade or so, the automotive industry has been rapidly adopting and deploying innovative and revolutionary technologies in automobiles. One such revolution is the autonomous vehicle technology. While this technology is not fully mature yet, some components of this technology are. Many late model automobiles… Read More
Beyond Traditional OOO: A Time-Based, Slice-Based Approach to High-Performance RISC-V CPUs