Acceleration in a Heterogenous Compute Environment

Acceleration in a Heterogenous Compute Environment
by Bernard Murphy on 10-02-2019 at 5:00 am

Acceleration

Heterogenous compute isn’t a new concept. We’ve had it in phones and datacenters for quite a while – CPUs complemented by GPUs, DSPs and perhaps other specialized processors. But each of these compute engines has a very specific role, each driven by its own software (or training in the case of AI accelerators). You write software… Read More


Webinar: Finding Your Way Through Formal Verification

Webinar: Finding Your Way Through Formal Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 10-01-2019 at 6:00 am

Finding your way through formal book

Formal verification has always appeared daunting to me and I suspect to many other people also. Logic simulation feels like a “roll your sleeves up and get the job done” kind of verification, easily understood, accessible to everyone, little specialized training required. Formal methods for many years remained the domain of … Read More


Virtually Verifying SSD Controllers

Virtually Verifying SSD Controllers
by Bernard Murphy on 09-26-2019 at 5:00 am

Datacenter storage

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are rapidly gaining popularity for storage in many applications, in gigabytes of storage in lightweight laptops to tens to hundreds of terabyte drives in datacenters. SSDs are intrinsically faster, quieter and lower-power than their hard disk-drive (HDD) equivalents, with roughly similar lifetimes,… Read More


How Should I Cache Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

How Should I Cache Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
by Bernard Murphy on 09-25-2019 at 5:00 am

cache hierarchy

Caching intent largely hasn’t changed since we started using the concept – to reduce average latency in memory accesses and to reduce average power consumption in off-chip reads and writes. The architecture started out simple enough, a small memory close to a processor, holding most-recently accessed instructions and data … Read More


Glasses and Open Architecture for Computer Vision

Glasses and Open Architecture for Computer Vision
by Bernard Murphy on 09-18-2019 at 6:00 am

Fisheye view

You know that AI can now look at an image and detect significant objects like a pedestrian or a nearby car. But had you thought about a need for corrective lenses or other vision aids? Does AI vision decay over time, like ours, so that it needs increasing help to read prescription labels and identify road signs at a distance?

In fact no.… Read More


Tcling Your Way to Low Power Verification

Tcling Your Way to Low Power Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 09-11-2019 at 5:00 am

OK – maybe that sounds a little weird, but it’s not a bad description of what Mentor suggests in a recent white-paper. There are at least three aspects to power verification – static verification of the UPF and the UPF against the RTL, formal verification of state transition logic, and dynamic verification of at least some critical… Read More


AI, Safety and the Network

AI, Safety and the Network
by Bernard Murphy on 09-04-2019 at 6:00 am

If you follow my blogs you know that Arteris IP is very active in these areas, leveraging their central value in network-on-chip (NoC) architectures. Kurt Shuler has put together a front-to-back white-paper to walk you through the essentials of AI, particularly machine learning (ML) and its application for example in cars.

He… Read More


Lint for Implementation

Lint for Implementation
by Bernard Murphy on 08-29-2019 at 6:00 am

Conformal Litmus

When I was at Atrenta, we took advantage of opportunities to expand our static tool (aka linting) first to clock domain crossing (CDC) analysis and DFT compatibility and later to static analysis of timing constraints, all of which have importance in implementation. CDC is commonly thought of as an RTL-centric analysis, however,… Read More


Build More and Better Tests Faster

Build More and Better Tests Faster
by Bernard Murphy on 08-27-2019 at 5:00 am

Breker has been in the system test synthesis game for 12 years, starting long before there was a PSS standard. Which means they probably have this figured out better than most, quite simply because they’ve seen it all and done it all. Breker is heavily involved in and aligned with the standard of course but it shouldn’t be surprising… Read More


Xilinx on ANSYS Elastic Compute for Timing and EM/IR

Xilinx on ANSYS Elastic Compute for Timing and EM/IR
by Bernard Murphy on 08-20-2019 at 5:00 am

RedHawk-SC

I’m a fan of getting customer reality checks on advanced design technologies. This is not so much because vendors put the best possible spin on their product capabilities; of course they do (within reason), as does every other company aiming to stay in business. But application by customers on real designs often shows lower performance,… Read More