An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight

An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight
by Bernard Murphy on 03-11-2020 at 6:00 am

Metrics

Security has been a domain blessed with an abundance of methods to improve in various ways, not so much in methods to measure the effectiveness of those improvements. With the best will in the world, absent an agreed security measurement, all those improvement techniques still add up to “trust me, our baby monitor camera is really… Read More


Trends in AI and Safety for Cars

Trends in AI and Safety for Cars
by Bernard Murphy on 03-03-2020 at 6:00 am

AI at the Edge

The potential for AI in cars, whether for driver assistance or full autonomy, has been trumpeted everywhere and continues to grow. Within the car we have vision, radar and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles in front, behind and to the side of the car. Outside the car, V2x promises to share real-time information between vehicles… Read More


Hybrid Verification for Deep Sequential Convergence

Hybrid Verification for Deep Sequential Convergence
by Bernard Murphy on 02-26-2020 at 6:00 am

Hybrid Verification Synopsys

I’m always curious to learn what might be new in clock domain crossing (CDC) verification, having dabbled in this area in my past. It’s an arcane but important field, the sort of thing that if missed can put you out of business, but otherwise only a limited number of people want to think about it to any depth.

 

The core issue is something… Read More


Build Custom SoC Assembly Platforms

Build Custom SoC Assembly Platforms
by Bernard Murphy on 02-25-2020 at 6:00 am

STAR RTL design builder

I’ve talked with Defacto on and off for several years – Chouki Aktouf (CEO) and Bastien Gratreaux (Marketing). I was in a similar line of business back in Atrenta. Now I’m just enjoying myself, I’ve written a few blogs for them. I’ll confess I wondered why they wouldn’t struggle with the same problems we’d had. Script-driven RTL editing,… Read More


High-Level Synthesis at the Edge

High-Level Synthesis at the Edge
by Bernard Murphy on 02-19-2020 at 6:00 am

AI Traditional Hardware Solutions

Custom AI acceleration continues to gather steam. In the cloud, Alibaba has launched its own custom accelerator, following Amazon and Google. Facebook is in the game too and Microsoft has a significant stake in Graphcore. Intel/Mobileye have a strong lock on edge AI in cars and wireless infrastructure builders are adding AI capabilities… Read More


Thermal Reliability Challenges in Automotive and Data Center Applications – A Xilinx Perspective

Thermal Reliability Challenges in Automotive and Data Center Applications – A Xilinx Perspective
by Bernard Murphy on 02-13-2020 at 6:00 am

thermometer

I wrote recently on ANSYS and TSMC’s joint work on thermal reliability workflows, as these become much more important in advanced processes and packaging. Xilinx provided their own perspective on thermal reliability analysis for their unquestionably large systems – SoC, memory, SERDES and high-speed I/O – stacked within a … Read More


Innovation in Verification – February 2020

Innovation in Verification – February 2020
by Bernard Murphy on 02-11-2020 at 6:00 am

Innovation in Verification

This blog is the next in a series in which Paul Cunningham (GM of the Verification Group at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I pick a paper on a novel idea in verification and debate its strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Our goal is to support and appreciate further innovation in this area. Please let us know what you think and please… Read More


Verification, RISC-V and Extensibility

Verification, RISC-V and Extensibility
by Bernard Murphy on 02-05-2020 at 6:00 am

RISC-V

RISC-V is obviously making progress. Independent of licensee signups and new technical offerings, the simple fact that Arm is responding – in fundamental changes to their licensing model and in allowing custom user extensions to the instruction set – is proof enough that they see a real competitive threat from RISC-V.

Which all… Read More


How Good is Your Testbench?

How Good is Your Testbench?
by Bernard Murphy on 01-29-2020 at 6:00 am

Limitations of coverage

I’ve always been intrigued by Synopsys’ Certitude technology. It’s a novel approach to the eternal problem of how to get better coverage in verification. For a design of any reasonable complexity, the state-space you would have to cover to exhaustively consider all possible behaviors is vastly larger than you could ever possibly… Read More


A Bundle of Goodies in Bluetooth 5.2, LE Audio

A Bundle of Goodies in Bluetooth 5.2, LE Audio
by Bernard Murphy on 01-15-2020 at 6:00 am

Bluetooth

You know that a technology is becoming a trend to watch when the Economist writes a piece on the topic. We know how big an investment goes into monetizing visual content for our phones, pads and TVs, through the likes of Warner Media, Disney and Netflix. Now there’s a big push into monetizing our ears, driven by Apple and others on the… Read More