The 32nd VLSI Design/CAD Symposium just occurred in a virtual setting. The theme of the event this year was “ICs Powering Smart Life Innovation”. There were many excellent presentations across analog & RF, EDA & testing, digital & system, and emerging technology. There were also some excellent keynotes, and this… Read More





Synopsys’ Complete 800G Ethernet Solutions
If I ask the question, “What has grown 4,000x over the last twenty-five years?”, most people will start throwing names of some stocks. Although various stock markets have had crazy run ups and yes, there is a stock that has grown 2,500x over that period of time, the answer to the 4,000x question is not a stock. What if I modify the question… Read More
AI Acceleration: Autonomous is Driving
Large numbers of sensors, massive amounts of data, ever-increasing computing power, real-time operation and security concerns required for autonomous vehicles are driving the core of computation from the cloud to the edge of the network. Autonomous vehicles are constantly sensing and sending data on road conditions, location… Read More
Musk’s Massive Mobile Gambit
A few weeks ago Mobile World Congress included among its keynotes a live interview with Tesla CEO Elon Musk moderated by Mobile World Live Publisher Justin Springham. The subject was Starlink, the low earth orbit (LEO) constellation intended to deliver global Internet access.
Mobile World Congress Musk keynote interview
Tongue-in-cheek… Read More
Debugging Embedded Software on Veloce
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
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet