Functional Verification for complex ASICs or IP-Core products is a resource limited ‘quest’ to find as many bugs as possible before tape-out or release. It can be a long, difficult and costly search that is constrained by cost, time and quality. The search space is practically infinite, and 100% exhaustive verification is an unrealistic… Read More





Podcast EP9: Why Fabs and Fabless Matter
Dan and Mike are joined by Ray Zinn, the longest serving CEO in Silicon Valley. Join us for a tour of the very beginnings of the semiconductor industry and the rise of the fabless movement. Beyond a historical perspective, Ray also discusses the importance of semiconductor technology and its impact on the world, governments and … Read More
CEO interview: Graham Curren of Sondrel
It has been my pleasure to interview Graham Curren, CEO of Sondrel. A veteran of the Electronics Design industry, he founded Sondrel in 2002 to provide digital ASIC designs.
How did you aim to differentiate Sondrel when you started?
My view of the market was that there were a lot of small design companies and also huge in-house design… Read More
FD-SOI Offers Refreshing Performance and Flexibility for Mobile Applications
SoC designers often have to make a, “red pill or blue pill,” decision when it comes to selecting process technology. Usually, a choice has to be made between performance, power and area, with one being prioritized at the expense of the others. However, as is pointed out in a recent paper by Mixel and NXP, designers can have the best … 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
HCL Expands Cloud Choices with a Comprehensive Guide to Azure Deployment
HCL Compass is quite a powerful tool to accelerate project delivery and increase developer productivity. Last August I detailed a webinar about HCL Compass that will help you understand the benefits and impact of a tool like this. This technology falls into the category of DevOps, which aims to shorten the systems development … Read More
Finding Large Coverage Holes. Innovation in Verification
Is it possible to find and prioritize holes in coverage through AI-based analytics on coverage data? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Using Machine Learning Clustering To Find Large Coverage … Read More
Single HW/SW Bill of Material (BoM) Benefits System Development
Most large electronics companies take a divide and conquer approach to projects, with clear division lines set between HW and SW engineers, so quite often the separate teams have distinct methodologies and ways to design, document, communicate and save a BoM. This division can lead to errors in the system development process,… Read More
Achronix Demystifies FPGA Technology Migration
System designers who are switching to a new FPGA platform have a lot to think about. Naturally a change like this is usually done for good reasons, but there are always considerations regarding device configurations, interfaces and the tool chain to deal with. To help users who have decided to switch to their FPGA technology, Achronix… Read More
Silicon Catalyst and mmTron are Helping to Make mmWave 5G a Reality
Everyone is talking about 5G these days. The buildout is beginning. The newest iPhone supports the new 3GPP standard. Excitement is building. But there is a back story to all this. Silicon Catalyst recently added a new company called mmTron to their incubator program. These folks are millimeter wave experts and that turns out to… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet