I mentioned in an earlier blog that multiple presentations at DVCon 2025 went all-in on AI-assisted design and verification. The presentation was one such example, looking very much at top-down AI-expert application of agentic flows to design and verification. AlphaDesign is a new startup out of UC Santa Barbara headed by William… Read More
DVCon 2025 was unquestionably a forum for pulling out all the stops in AI-based (RTL) design and verification, particularly around generative AI and agentic methods. I heard three product pitches and a keynote and have been told that every AI talk was standing room only. A pitch from Rise-DA particularly appealed to me because … Read More
What’s new in debugging multi-/many-core systems? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
This month’s pick is Post-Silicon… Read More
Modern semiconductor devices, a far cry from the chips we once knew, are now highly complex intelligent systems used in datacenters, communications infrastructure, in consumer electronics, automotive, home and office automation, almost everywhere. All such applications build around large subsystems, invariably compute,… Read More
As usual in January we start with a look back at the papers we reviewed last year. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
These … Read More
In the early days of the PSS rollout, some verification engineers were suspicious. Just as they were beginning to get comfortable with UVM, here came yet another standard to add to their learning and complexity overhead. Then the fog started to clear; UVM is ideal for block-level testing whereas PSS is ideal for system level testing.… Read More
The moral of today’s story is that to succeed in a late-adopter market, sometimes you just have to wait for the market to catch up (assuming you have a strong early adopter market to buy your product today). I have been working with Arteris for 6+ years now promoting their NoC technology, and there was never any question that they offer… Read More
3D design with high-bandwidth memory stacks (HBM) has become essential for leading edge semiconductor systems in multiple applications. Hyperscalers depend on large AI accelerator cores supported by 100GB or more of in-package HBM to handle trillion parameter AI models. Autonomous Drive (AD) vehicles may handle smaller … Read More
Following a similar topic we covered early last year, here we look at updated research to accelerating RTL simulation through domain-specific hardware. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our … Read More
From my viewpoint, standards organizations in semiconductor design always looked like they were “sharpening the saw”: further polishing/refining what we already have but not often pushing on frontiers. Very necessary of course to stabilize and get common agreement in standards but equally always seeming to be behind the innovation… Read More
