Innovation in Verification – January 2020

Innovation in Verification – January 2020
by Bernard Murphy on 01-09-2020 at 6:00 am

Innovation

I’m kicking off a blog series which should appeal to many of us in functional verification. Paul Cunningham (GM of the Verification Group at Cadence), Jim Hogan (angel investor and board member extraordinaire) and I (sometime blogger) like to noodle from time to time on papers and other verification articles which inspire us.… Read More


Tortuga Logic Scores Role in DoD Security Programs

Tortuga Logic Scores Role in DoD Security Programs
by Bernard Murphy on 01-07-2020 at 6:00 am

DoD logo

It should be no surprise in the current climate that the US government is ramping up investment in microelectronics security, particularly with an eye on China and investments they are making in the same area. This has two major thrusts as I read it: to ensure trusted and assured microelectronics are being used in US defense systems… Read More


No Coal in This Stocking: VCs and Nuclear Fusion

No Coal in This Stocking: VCs and Nuclear Fusion
by Bernard Murphy on 12-25-2019 at 6:00 am

Is fusion energy close?

Tis the time of year when product pitches are 100% at consumers. No-one in their right mind wants to push the nerdy behind-the-scenes stuff we usually talk about. This is a chance for me to go off the rails a little and consider unusual directions in innovation. We know all about VCs underwriting self-driving cars, intelligent everything… Read More


A VIP to Accelerate Verification for Hyperscalar Caching

A VIP to Accelerate Verification for Hyperscalar Caching
by Bernard Murphy on 12-18-2019 at 6:00 am

NVMe

Non-volatile memory (NVM) is finding new roles in datacenters, not currently so much in “cold storage” as a replacement for hard disk drives, but definitely in “warm storage”. Warm storage applications target an increasing number of functions requiring access to databases with much lower latency than is possible through paths… Read More


Autonomous Driving Still Terra Incognita

Autonomous Driving Still Terra Incognita
by Bernard Murphy on 12-12-2019 at 6:00 am

Whither self-driving?

I already posted on one automotive panel at this year’s Arm TechCon. A second I attended was a more open-ended discussion on where we’re really at in autonomous driving. Most of you probably agree we’ve passed the peak of the hype curve and are now into the long slog of trying to connect hope to reality. There are a lot of challenges, … Read More


The First Must-Have in 5G

The First Must-Have in 5G
by Bernard Murphy on 12-11-2019 at 6:00 am

Bulk acoustic wave filter

If I was asked about must-have needs for 5G, I’d probably talk about massive MIMO and a lot of exotic parallel DSP processing, also perhaps need for new intelligent approaches to link adaptation and intelligent network slicing in the infrastructure. But there’s something that comes before that all that digital cleverness, in … Read More


Arm Inches Closer to Supercomputing

Arm Inches Closer to Supercomputing
by Bernard Murphy on 12-04-2019 at 6:00 am

Summit supercomputer

When it comes to Arm, we think mostly of phones and the “things” in the IoT. We know they’re in a lot of other places too, such as communications infrastructure but that’s a kind of diffuse image – “yeah, they’re everywhere”. We like easy-to-understand targets: phones, IoT devices, we get those. More recently Arm started to talk about… Read More


MEMS Actuation and the Art of Prototyping

MEMS Actuation and the Art of Prototyping
by Bernard Murphy on 11-27-2019 at 5:00 am

Thermal actuator prototyping

I mentioned a while back that I’m really getting into the role that sensors play in our new hyper-connected world – in the IoT, intelligent cars, homes, cities, industry, utilities, medicine, agriculture, etc, etc. If we can think of a way to sense it and connect it, someone is probably already doing it. But there’s more to … Read More


NXP Pushes GHz Performance in Crossover MCU

NXP Pushes GHz Performance in Crossover MCU
by Bernard Murphy on 11-20-2019 at 6:00 am

RT1170 system

I first heard about NXP crossover MCUs at the 2017 TechCon. I got another update at this year’s TechCon, this time their progress on performance and capability in this family. They’ve been ramping performance – a lot – now to a gigahertz, based on a dual-core architecture, M7 and M4. They position this as between 2 and 9X faster than… Read More


Evolving Landscape of Self-Driving Safety Standards

Evolving Landscape of Self-Driving Safety Standards
by Bernard Murphy on 11-14-2019 at 5:00 am

Autonomous Vehicle

I sat in a couple of panels at Arm TechCon this year, the first on how safety is evolving for platform-based architectures with a mix of safety-aware IP and the second on lessons learned in safety and particularly how the industry and standards are adapting to the larger challenges in self-driving, which obviously extend beyond … Read More