While systems design underpins the explosion in “smart everything”, it remains somewhat isolated from another explosion—the proliferation of tools for application lifecycle management (ALM). ALM tools are prevalent on the web, in the cloud and on our phones, to streamline product design and build, to track correspondence… Read More
This standard has been around in one form or another for over ten years and was then arguably ahead of its time. RTL designers were confused: ‘We already have RTL. Why do we need something else?’ I also didn’t get it. Still, the standard plugged ahead among the faithful and found traction among IP vendors. Particularly as a common format… Read More
I recently had a discussion with Tom Fitzpatrick of Siemens and Faris Khundakjie of Intel on the latest release of the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS). Faris chairs the PSS working group and Tom is vice-chair. In what follows I synthesize feedback from both, sometimes I call out interesting individual comments. My first… Read More
Fuzzing is to software verification what randomization is hardware verification. Can a fuzzing approach improve hardware security testing? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback… Read More
Let me acknowledge up front that Avery isn’t the most visible EDA company around. If you know of them, you probably know their X-propagation simulator. Widely respected and used, satisfying a specialized need. They have also been quietly building over the years a stable of VIPs and happy customers, with a special focus on VIPs for… Read More
Arteris IP recently spoke at the Spring Linley Processor Conference on April 21, 2021 about Automotive systems-on-chip (SoCs) architecture with artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and Functional Safety. Stefano Lorenzini presented a nice contrast between auto AI SoCs and those designed for datacenters.… Read More
Among marketing principles, “Stay Visible’ must rank as one of the highest. Meaning that if you don’t have something new to announce on a regular basis, you disappear. Most important, among the people you hope to influence, you cease to exist. As true for small ventures as large, though small ventures struggle to understand or prioritize… Read More
Vision pipelines, from image signal processing (ISP) through AI processing and fancy effects (super-resolution, Bokeh and others) has become fundamental to almost every aspect of the modern world. In automotive safety, robotics, drones, mobile applications and AR/VR, what we now consider essential we couldn’t do without… Read More
Remember the days when verification meant running a simulator with directed tests? (Back then we just called them tests.) Then came static and formal verification, simulation running in farms, emulation and FPGA prototyping. We now have UVM, constrained random testing and many different test objectives (functional, power,… Read More
It would be nice if there were a pre-packaged set of assertions which could formally check all aspects of cache coherence in an SoC. In fact, formal checks do a very nice job for the control aspects of a coherent network. But that covers only one part of the cache coherence verification task. Dataflow checks are just as important, where… Read More
