“Who guards the guardians?” This is a question from Roman times which occurred to me as relevant to this topic. We use constrained random to get better coverage in simulation. But what ensures that our constrained random testbenches are not wanting, maybe over constrained or deficient in other ways? If we are improving with a faulty… Read More
Amid the alphabet soup of inter-die/chip coherent access protocols, CXL is gaining a lot of traction. Originally proposed by Intel for cross-board and cross-backplane connectivity to accelerators of various types (GPU, AI, warm storage, etc.), a who’s who of systems and chip companies now sits on the board, joined by an equally… Read More
I recently had an update from Lu Dai, Chairman of Accellera, also Sr. Director of Engineering at Qualcomm. He’s always a pleasure to talk to, in this instance giving me a capsule summary of status in 3 areas that interested me: CDC, Functional Safety and AMS. I will start with CDC, a new proposed working group in Accellera. To manage… Read More
Very recently, 3GPP announced that 5G Release 17 was finalized. One important consequence is that 5G RedCap (reduced capacity) is now real and that means 5G becomes accessible to IoT devices. Think smart wearables (e.g. watches), industrial sensors and surveillance devices. “So what?”, you protest. “I don’t need 5G on my watch.… Read More
Artificially stalling datapaths and virtual channels is a creative method to uncover corner case timing bugs. A paper from Nvidia describes a refinement to this technique. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue… Read More
It is common when a new type of analysis is introduced in almost any domain that it works well enough for a while. Until it begins to struggle with growing problem size, prompting refinements to the methodology to allow continued scaling. We see this routinely in analytics for SoC design, so it should not be a big surprise that safety… Read More
I’ve written several articles on High-Level Synthesis (HLS), designing in C, C++ or SystemC, then synthesizing to RTL. There is unquestionable appeal to the concept. A higher level of abstraction enables a function to be described in less lines of code (LOC). Which immediately offers higher productivity and implies less bugs… Read More
I wrote recently about Siemens EDA’s philosophy on designing quality in from the outset, rather than trying to verify it in. The first step is moving up the level of abstraction for design. They mentioned the advantages of HLS in this respect and I refined that to “for DSP-centric applications”. A Stanford group recently presented… Read More
SLAM – simultaneous localization and mapping – is already a well-established technology in robotics. This generally starts with visual SLAM, using object recognition to detect landmarks and obstacles. VSLAM alone uses a 2D view of a 3D environment, challenging accuracy; improvements depend on complementary sensing inputs… Read More
It has been an article of faith that you can’t use formal tools to validate datapath logic (math components). Formal is for control logic, not datapath, we now realize. We understood the reason – wide inputs (32-bit, 64-bit or more) fed through a multiplier deliver eye-watering state space sizes. State space explosions also happen… Read More
