Like it or not, the surveillance market is growing, at a CAGR approaching 10%. Big brother concerns sometimes cloud the picture but overlook the much larger practical yet less hype-worthy applications for surveillance. Home and industrial security, enhanced traffic flow management, monitoring for fire and other fast-growing… Read More
As usual in January we start with a look back at the papers we reviewed last year. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome. And don’t forget to come see us at DVCon,… Read More
Formal methods for digital verification have advanced enormously over the last couple of decades, mostly in support of verification in control and data transport logic. The popular view had been that datapath logic was not amenable to such techniques. Control/transport proofs depend on property verification; if a proof is … Read More
This. AI in PCB design is not a new idea. Other PCB software companies also make that claim. But when a mainstream systems technology company like Siemens talks about the subject, that is noteworthy. They already have an adaptive user interface (UI) for their mechanical modeling suite and to assist in low-code development for application… Read More
Network on Chip (NoC) connectivity is ubiquitous in SoCs, therefore should be an attractive attack vector. Is it possible to prove robustness against a broad and configurable range of threats? Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and… Read More
How do you reconfigure system characteristics? The answer to that question is well established – through software. Make the underlying hardware general enough and use platform software to update behaviors and tweak hardware configuration registers. This simple fact drove the explosion of embedded processors everywhere … Read More
Looking for better ways to search a huge state space in model checking, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is one possible approach. Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always,… Read More
Configurable processors are hot now, in no small part thanks to RISC-V. Which is an ISA rather than a processor, but let’s not quibble. Arm followed with configurability in Cortex-X. Both were considerably preceded (a couple of decades) by Synopsys ARC® RISC CPUs and CEVA DSPs. Each stressed configurability as a differentiator… Read More
I’ve written on and off about sensors, ML inference of the output of those sensors and the application of both in modern cars. Neither ADAS nor autonomous/semi-autonomous driving would be possible without these. But until now I have never covered the transport between sensors and the compute that safely turns what they produce… Read More
In wearables and hearables, low power is king. Earbuds for example still only manage a half-day active use before we need to recharge. Half a day falls short of truly convenient for most of us – a full day would be much better, allowing for overnight recharge. Physics limits battery sizes so system designers must look to SoC architectures… Read More
