Drones attacked an oil processing facility last week and shut down half of all Saudi capacity, representing about 5% of the world’s daily oil production. We have seen how a botnet of compromised home appliances can take down a sizeable chunk of the internet, control structures of electricity and other critical infrastructures… Read More
FPGA Prototyping in Practice: Addressing Peripheral Connectivity ChallengesModern chip design verification often encounters challenges when…Read More
An Insight into Building Quantum ComputersGiven my physics background I’m ashamed to admit…Read More
I Have Seen the Future with ChipAgents Autonomous Root Cause AnalysisI have seen a lot of EDA tool…Read More
Arm FCSA and the Journey to Standardizing Open Chiplet-Based DesignI have written before about an inter-chiplet communication…Read MoreAutomatic Documentation Generation for RTL Design and Verification
Ask any hardware or software engineer working on a product, and they will tell you that writing documentation is a pain. Customers have high expectations for user manuals and reference guides, usually requiring a team of technical writers to satisfy their requirements. In order to meet time-to-market deadlines, documentation… Read More
More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel
The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel. We had a really complex process! But —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx. TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology. We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More
Radio: Relevant, Unifying, Intimate, Vulnerable
It was hard to escape the notion while attending RadiodaysAsia2019 that the world is experiencing what can only be called “peak radio.” Radio has the widest audience reach of any content delivery medium anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of India, according to researchers such as Nielsen Media, Gfk, Rajar, Edison
WEBINAR: Reusing Your IPs & PDKs Successfully With Cadence® Virtuoso®
I recently wrote about a ClioSoft® study with Google on using cloud platforms for EDA design and the importance of using persistent storage when doing that. ClioSoft will again be sharing important information on design productivity in the upcoming webinar, Reusing Your IPs & PDKs Successfully With Cadence® Virtuoso®. … Read More
Chapter Ten – Design Automation for Systems
Electronic design automation has evolved to an extent that the complex chips with tens of billions of transistors frequently produce first pass functional prototypes from the manufacturer. What makes this so incredible is that such a small portion of the possible states of electronic operation are actually tested in the simulation… Read More
Synopsys is First IP Provider with a Complete CXL Implementation Available
Synopsys just announced the availability of their IP solution supporting CXL (Compute Express Link). This new protocol is going to be an important component for several applications expected to be shipping starting in 2021. CXL is an alternate protocol that runs on the same physical layer as PCI Express (PCIe). Among other usages,… Read More
Ford Prioritizes Safety; Revolutionizes Connectivity
Ford Motor Company’s debt may have been downgraded to junk this week, but the company’s savvy strategy for vehicle safety and connectivity has had an outsize influence on the broader automotive industry. That is the takeaway message from this week’s ITS California gathering of transportation executives taking place in Los
Tcling Your Way to Low Power Verification
OK – maybe that sounds a little weird, but it’s not a bad description of what Mentor suggests in a recent white-paper. There are at least three aspects to power verification – static verification of the UPF and the UPF against the RTL, formal verification of state transition logic, and dynamic verification of at least some critical… Read More
GM’s Dashboard Surrender
There was a time when General Motors’ OnStar offering was readily and clearly understood by consumers for the fact that it did one thing incredibly well: summoning assistance in the event of a vehicle crash and airbag deployment. This now-23-year-old connected car solution still stands strong as a powerful brand-defining … Read More



An Insight into Building Quantum Computers