Two recently announced vulnerabilities in major processor platforms should remind us that bugs don’t organize themselves to appear only in domains we know how to test comprehensively. Both Meltdown and Spectre (the announced problems) are potential hardware system-level issues allowed by interactions between speculative… Read More
For any given design objective, there is what we in the design automation biz preach that design teams should do, and then there’s what designs teams actually do. For some domains, the gap between these two may be larger than others, but we more or less assume that methodologies which have been around for years and are considered to… Read More
The electronics market for automotive applications is distinguished by multiple factors. This is a very fast growing market – electronics now account for 40% of a car’s cost, up from 20% just 10 years ago. New technologies are gaining acceptance, for greener and safer operation and for a more satisfying consumer experience. Platforms… Read More
Yes, it means complete hardware and software integration, debugging, verification, optimization of performance and power and all other operational aspects of an electronic system in semiconductor design. In modern SoCs, several IPs, RTL blocks, software modules, firmware and so on sit together on a single chip, hence making… Read More
Designing an LTE modem is an interesting case study in architectural and system level design because it is pretty much on the limit of what is possible in a current process node such as 28nm. I talked to Johannes Stahl of Synopsys about how you would accomplish this with the Synopsys suite of system level tools. He is the first to admit… Read More
Cavium designs some very complex SoCs containing multiple ARM or MIPS cores at 32 and 64 bit. This complexity leads to major challenges in validating the overall chip architecture to ensure that their designs will meet the requirements of their customers once they are completed, with performance as high as 100Gbps.
Cavium have… Read More
