You might have heard of the Multicore and Multiprocessor SoC (MPSoC) Forum sponsored by IEEE and other industry associations and companies. This group of top-notch academic and industry technical leaders gets together once a year to talk about hardware and software architecture and applications for multicore and multiprocessor… Read More
Agile methods in hardware design are becoming topical again. What does this mean for verification? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence) and I continue our series on research ideas. We’re also honored this month to welcome Raúl Camposano to our blog as a very distinguished replacement for Jim Hogan. As always, feedback… Read More
This wasn’t as much of a big bang announcement as others I have seen. More a polishing of earlier-announced reveals, positioning updates, together with some new concepts. First, you probably remember the Cortex-X announcement from about a year ago, allowing users to customize their own instructions into the standard instruction… Read More
Siemens EDA’s Veloce emulation products are long-established and worthy contenders in any emulation smack-down. But there was always a hole in the complete acceleration story. Where was the FPGA prototyper? Current practice requires emulation for fast simulation with hardware debug, plus prototyping for faster simulation… Read More
Cadence calls their hardware acceleration platforms, Palladium Z2 for fast pre-silicon hardware debug and Protium X2 for fast pre-silicon software validation, their Dynamic Duo. With good reason. Hardware acceleration is now fundamental to managing the complexity of verification and validation for large systems, hardware… Read More
Pratik Mahajan, Synopsys VC Formal R&D Group Director, kicked off an absorbing event featuring talks from multiple customers in Europe. He spent some time on formal signoff, an important topic that I’m still not sure is fully understood. Answering the questions “OK, we did a bunch of formal checking but how does that affect… Read More
You verified your product design against every scenario your team could imagine. Simulated, emulated, with constrained random to push coverage as high as possible. Maybe you even added virtualized testing against realistic external traffic. You tape out, wait with fingers crossed for first silicon to come back. Plug it into… Read More
Is there a way to reduce cycle time in mapping large SoCs to an FPGA-based emulator? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan (RIP) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Improving FPGA-Based Logic Emulation Systems through Machine Learning… Read More
On its face System-on-chip (SoC) integration doesn’t seem so hard. You gather and configure all the intellectual properties (IPs) you’re going to need, then stitch them together. Something you could delegate to new college hires, maybe? But it isn’t that simple. What makes SoC integration challenging is that there are so many… Read More
An unavoidable consequence of getting older is that more frequently our friends and colleagues unexpectedly leave us for their final venture. Jim Hogan, widely known and loved in the semiconductor industry, has passed on. He will leave a substantial hole in the hearts of many. Always ready with seasoned advice, a sympathetic … Read More
