An Enduring Growth Challenge for Formal Verification

An Enduring Growth Challenge for Formal Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 05-08-2024 at 6:00 am

Math blackboard min

A high-quality verification campaign including methods able to absolutely prove the correctness of critical design behaviors as a complement to mainstream dynamic verification? At first glance this should be a no-brainer. Formal verification offers that option and formal adoption has been growing steadily, now used in around… Read More


Anirudh Keynote at CadenceLIVE 2024. Big Advances, Big Goals

Anirudh Keynote at CadenceLIVE 2024. Big Advances, Big Goals
by Bernard Murphy on 05-01-2024 at 6:00 am

Anirudh keynote at CadenceLive 2024

The great things about CEO keynotes, at least from larger companies, is that you not only learn about recent advances but you also get a sense of the underlying algorithm for growth. Particularly reinforced when followed by discussions with high profile partner CEOs on their directions and areas of common interest. I saw this recently… Read More


Alphawave Semi Bridges from Theory to Reality in Chiplet-Based AI

Alphawave Semi Bridges from Theory to Reality in Chiplet-Based AI
by Bernard Murphy on 04-25-2024 at 10:00 am

Alphawave Semi min

GenAI, the most talked-about manifestation of AI these days, imposes two tough constraints on a hardware platform. First, it demands massive memory to serve large language model with billions of parameters. Feasible in principle for a processor plus big DRAM off-chip and perhaps for some inference applications but too slow … Read More


Fault Sim on Multi-Core Arm Platform in China. Innovation in Verification

Fault Sim on Multi-Core Arm Platform in China. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 04-24-2024 at 6:00 am

Innovation New

How much can running on a multi-core (Arm) CPU speed up fault simulation? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.

The Innovation

This month’s pick is FaultRead More


Lifecycle Management, FuSa, Reliability and More for Automotive Electronics

Lifecycle Management, FuSa, Reliability and More for Automotive Electronics
by Bernard Murphy on 04-22-2024 at 6:00 am

Lifecycle Management for Automotive Electronics min

Synopsys recently hosted an information rich-webinar, modestly titled “Improving Quality, FuSa, Reliability, and Security in Automotive Semiconductors”. I think they undersold the event; this was really about managing all of those things through the lifecycle of a car, in line with auto OEMs strategies for the future of the… Read More


Cadence Debuts Dynamic Duo III with a Basket of Goodies

Cadence Debuts Dynamic Duo III with a Basket of Goodies
by Bernard Murphy on 04-18-2024 at 6:00 am

Dynamic Duo III min

I am a fan of product releases which bundle together multiple high-value advances. That approach reduces the frequency of releases (no bad thing) in exchange for more to offer per release, better proven through solid partner validation. The Dynamic Duo III release falls in this class, offering improvements in performance, capacity,… Read More


Managing Power at Datacenter Scale

Managing Power at Datacenter Scale
by Bernard Murphy on 04-15-2024 at 6:00 am

Managing Power at Datacenter Scale

That datacenters are power hogs is not news, especially now AI is further aggravating this challenge. I found a recent proteanTecs-hosted panel on power challenges in datacenter infrastructure quite educational both in quantifying the scale of the problem and in understanding what steps are being taken to slow growth in power… Read More


Arteris Frames Network-On-Chip Topologies in the Car

Arteris Frames Network-On-Chip Topologies in the Car
by Bernard Murphy on 04-10-2024 at 6:00 am

Automotive use case min

On the heels of Arm’s 2024 automotive update, Arteris and Arm announced an update to their partnership. This has been extended to cover the latest AMBA5 protocol for coherent operation (CHI-E) in addition to already supported options such as CHI-B, ACE and others. There are a couple of noteworthy points here. First, Arm’s new Automotive… Read More


Are Agentic Workflows the Next Big Thing in AI?

Are Agentic Workflows the Next Big Thing in AI?
by Bernard Murphy on 04-04-2024 at 6:00 am

Agentic flows min min

AI continues to be a fast-moving space and we’re always looking for the next big thing. There’s a lot of buzz now around something called agentic workflows – ugly name but a good idea. LLMs had a good run as the state-of-the-AI-art, however evidence is building that the foundation model behind LLMs alone has limitations, both theoretically… Read More


Arm Automotive Update Stresses Prototyping for Software Development

Arm Automotive Update Stresses Prototyping for Software Development
by Bernard Murphy on 03-28-2024 at 6:00 am

Arm Automotive Update Stresses Prototyping for Software Development

If you were at all uncertain about auto OEM development priorities, the answer is becoming clear: to accelerate/shift left automotive software development and debug. At 100M lines of code and accelerating, this task is overshadowing all others. A recent Arm update from Dipti Vachani (SVP and GM for the Automotive Line of Business)… Read More