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


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