2020 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification

2020 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 01-20-2021 at 6:00 am

innovation min

Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I launched our series on Innovation in Verification at the beginning of last year. We wanted to explore basic innovations and new directions researchers are taking for hardware and system verification. Even we were surprised to find how rich a seam we had tapped. We plan… Read More


CDC, Low Power Verification. Mentor and Cypress Perspective

CDC, Low Power Verification. Mentor and Cypress Perspective
by Bernard Murphy on 01-13-2021 at 6:00 am

CDC Low Power

Clock domain crossing (CDC) analysis is unavoidable in any modern SoC design and is challenging enough to verify in its own right. CDC plus low power management adds more excitement to your verification task. I wrote on this topic for another solution provider last year. This time I want to intro an interesting twist on the problem,… Read More


Author Interview: Bernard Murphy on his latest book

Author Interview: Bernard Murphy on his latest book
by Daniel Nenni on 01-04-2021 at 10:00 am

The Tell Tale Entreprenuer

Over the last 40 years, Bernard has worked with semiconductor and EDA companies in hands-on, management and consulting roles in engineering, sales and marketing. He most recently co-founded Atrenta where he created and led the development of SpyGlass, retiring as CTO when Atrenta was acquired by Synopsys. Post-retirement,… Read More


ESL Expertise when You Need It. Spinning Up Faster

ESL Expertise when You Need It. Spinning Up Faster
by Bernard Murphy on 12-30-2020 at 6:00 am

CircuitSutra min

System-level expertise, once the domain a few architecture specialists, is now shouldering its way everywhere into chip design and verification. In virtual modeling together with OS and application software certainly. That now couples into mixed-level system-verification, using different levels of abstraction for different… Read More


The Heart of Trust in the Cloud. Hardware Security IP

The Heart of Trust in the Cloud. Hardware Security IP
by Bernard Murphy on 12-22-2020 at 6:00 am

The Heart of Trust in the Cloud

You might think that cloud services run on never-ending racks of servers and switches in giant datacenters. But what they really run on is trust. Trust that your data (or your client’s data) is absolutely tamper-proof inside that datacenter. Significantly more secure than it would be if you tried to manage the same operations in… Read More


An Accellera Update. COVID Accelerates Progress

An Accellera Update. COVID Accelerates Progress
by Bernard Murphy on 12-17-2020 at 6:00 am

logo accellera min

Normally I would post this Accellera update during DVCon US but, no surprise, this year is weird. Particularly in conferences going virtual. The last DVCon was in early March of this year, right on the cusp of the shutdown. I was there in person, as was Lu Dai (Chairman of Accellera). Both Synopsys and Cadence had dropped out, citing… Read More


More on Bug Localization. Innovation in Verification

More on Bug Localization. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 12-15-2020 at 6:00 am

innovation min

Mining assertions from constrained random simulations to localize bugs. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on research ideas. Feel free to comment.

The Innovation

This month’s pick is Symptomatic bug localization for functional debug of hardware designs. This paper was presented… Read More


Smoother MATLAB to HLS Flow

Smoother MATLAB to HLS Flow
by Bernard Murphy on 12-09-2020 at 6:00 am

A better design path from MATLAB 1 min

It hard to imagine design of a complex signal processing or computer vision application starting somewhere other than in MATLAB. Prove out the algorithm in MATLAB, then re-model in Simulink, to move closer to hardware. First probably an architectural model, using MATLAB library functions to prove out behavior of the larger system.… Read More


ML plus formal for analog. Innovation in Verification

ML plus formal for analog. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 11-30-2020 at 6:00 am

innovation min

Can machine learning be combined with formal to find rare failures in analog designs? ML plus formal for analog – neat! Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on research ideas. Here an idea from analog simulation sampling. Feel free to comment.

The Innovation

This month’s pick… Read More


Folding at Home. The Ultimate in Parallel Acceleration

Folding at Home. The Ultimate in Parallel Acceleration
by Bernard Murphy on 11-26-2020 at 6:00 am

COVID spike protein min

You may have heard of Folding at Home. It’s a very creative way that a bioengineering team, based at Washington University in St Louis, are modeling the process of protein folding. Greg Bowman, an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the university directs the project and presented at Arm DevSummit this year. … Read More