Verific is an unusual company. They are completely dominant in what they do – providing parsers for Verilog/SV, VHDL and UPF. Yet they have no ambition to expand beyond that goal. Instead, per Michiel Ligthart (President and COO), they continue to “sharpen the saw”. This is an expression I learned in sales training, habit #7 from… Read More
The great thing about architectural solutions to increasing throughput is that they offer big improvements. Multiple CPUs on a chip with (partially) shared cache hierarchies are now commonplace in server processors for this reason. But that big gain comes with significant added complexity in verifying correct behavior. In… Read More
Traceability as an emerging debate around hardware is gaining a lot of traction. As a reminder, traceability is the need to support a disciplined ability to trace from initial OEM requirements down through the value chain to implementation support and confirmed verification in software and hardware. Demand for traceability… Read More
As we established last year, we will use the January issue of this blog to look back at the papers we reviewed last year. We lost Jim Hogan and the benefit of his insight early last year, but we gained a new and also well-known expert in Raúl Camposano (another friend of Jim). Paul (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl (Silicon Catalyst,… Read More
One aspect of received wisdom on AI has been that all the innovation starts in the big machine learning/training engines in the cloud. Some of that innovation might eventually migrate in a reduced/ limited form to the edge. In part this reflected the newness of the field. Perhaps also in part it reflected need for prepackaged one-size-fits-many… Read More
Combining simulation and symbolic methods is an attractive way to excite rare branches in block-level verification, but is this method really scalable? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always,… Read More
Paul, Raúl and I are having fun with our Innovation in Verification series, and you seem to be also, judging by the hit rates we’re getting. We track these carefully to judge what you find most interesting and what seems to fall more under the category of “Meh”. Paul and others also get informal feedback in client meetings but it would… Read More
You could be forgiven for wondering why I should push 5G when it might seem marketing is still ahead of deployment. While we may not all have it today, GlobeNewswire (September 22, 2021 12:30 ET) estimates there will be 700 million 5G connections across the world by the end of this year. That’s pretty rapid growth already, though still… Read More
One of the sessions I enjoyed at the Synopsys Verification Day 2021 was a presentation on applying formal to a couple of non-traditional problem domains. I like talks of this kind because formal can sometimes be boxed into a limited set of applications, under-exploiting the potential of the technology. Intel have built a centralized… Read More
Since traceability and its relationship to ISO 26262 may be an unfamiliar topic for many of my readers, I thought it might be useful to spend some time on why this area is important. What is the motivation behind a need for traceability in support of automotive systems development? The classic verification and validation V-diagram… Read More
