The automotive segment is moving from a kind of niche, filled with commodities and highly specialized low complexity IC, to an innovative and very dynamic segment attracting most of the big players, from Qualcomm to Nvidia or Intel. These chip makers are targeting automotive as they need to find new growth areas, and they have quickly… Read More




Anirudh on Verification
I was fortunate to have a 1-on-1 with Anirudh before he delivered the keynote at DVCon. In case you don’t know the name, Dr. Anirudh Devgan is Executive VP and GM of the Digital & Signoff Group and the System & Verification Group at Cadence. He’s on a meteoric rise in the company, not least for what he has done for Cadence’s position… Read More
Lu Dai: Incoming Accellera Chair
One of the fun things about what I do is getting to meet some of the movers and shakers in the industry. You might not think of Accellera as a spot to find movers and shakers, but when you consider the impact they have had on what we do (OVL, SystemVerilog, UVM, UPF, SystemC, IP-XACT and others), design today would be unrecognizable without… Read More
Help for Automotive and Safety-critical Industries
I’ve been an Electrical Engineer and a car driver since 1978, so I’ve always been attracted to how the automotive industry designs cars to be safer for me and everyone else around the globe. According to statistics compiled by the CDCI learned that some 33,700 Americans died by motor vehicle crashes in 2014, which is… Read More
Eclipsing IDEs
In a discussion with Hilde Goosens at Sigasi, she reminded me of an important topic, relevant to the Sigasi platform. Some aspects of technology benefit from competition, others less obviously so and some absolutely require standardization. Imagine how chaotic mobile communication would be if wireless protocols weren’t standardized.… Read More
Improved Timing Closure for Network-on-Chip based SOC’s
Network on chip (NoC) already has a long list of compelling reasons driving its use in large SOC designs. However, this week Arteris introduced their PIANO 2.0 software that provides an even more compelling reason to use their FlexNoC architecture. Let’s recap. Arteris FlexNoC gives SOC architects and designers a powerful tool… Read More
ClioSoft Crushes it in 2016!
If you are designing chips in a competitive market with multiple design teams and IP reuse is a high priority then you probably already know about the ClioSoft SOS Platform. What you probably did not know however is how well they are doing with the re-architected version of their integrated design and IP management software.
We have… Read More
Synopsys and PhoeniX Demo Photonic IC Flow Using AIM PDK at OFC
Synopsys has long been known for its leading position in the digital logic synthesis world. More recently however, the company started delving into the world of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design. Synopsys started down this path from the system level with a 2010 acquisition of Optical Research Associates and their CODE… Read More
The Real Lesson from the AWS Outage
The embarrassing outage of Amazon Web Services this week should open our eyes to a growing problem. Complex systems are difficult to manage, but if they are connected in dependent ways, a fragile result emerges. Such structures are subject to unexpected malfunctions which can sprawl quickly. One of the most knowledgeable technology… Read More
Automotive OEMs Get Boost as NetSpeed NoC is Certified ISO 26262 Ready
I read with great interest today news from NetSpeed Systems that both their Gemini and Orion NoC IPs have been certified ISO 26262 ASIL D ready. They were certified by SGS-TUV Saar GmbH, an independent accredited assessor. This is a big deal as up till now, it was left up to the OEMs to do most of the heavily lifting to qualify their IC’s… Read More
Intel Foundry Delivers!