Power has become a very important metric in modern designs – for mobile and IoT devices which must live on a battery charge for days or years, for datacenters where power costs can be as significant as capital costs, and for increasingly unavoidable regulatory reasons. But accurate power estimation on a design must start from an … Read More
FPGAs have become a lot more capable and a lot more powerful, more closely resembling SoCs than the glue-logic we once considered them to be. Look at any big FPGA – a Xilinx Zynq, an Intel/Altera Arria or a Microsemi SmartFusion; these devices are full-blown SoCs, functionally different from an ASIC SoC only in that some of the device… Read More
Two-factor authentication has become commonplace for those of us determined to keep the bad guys at bay. You first request entry to a privileged site through a user-name/password, which in turn sends a code to your mobile device that you must enter to complete your admission to the site (there are other second factor methods, but… Read More
In our favorite Sci-Fi or fantasy movies or series we routinely expect voice-control of the many devices encountered in those stories. This seems natural because that’s how we most easily communicate our needs and intent (short of direct brain connections, though Elon Musk is apparently working on that). Typing on a keyboard … Read More
Pop quiz – name an event at which an EDA vendor would be unlikely to exhibit. How about The Trading Show in Chicago, later this month? That’s trading as in markets, high-frequency trading, blockchain and all that other trading-centric financial technology. This is another market, like cloud, where performance is everything and… Read More
When your design doesn’t work, who owns that problem? I don’t believe the answer to this question has changed significantly since semiconductor design started, despite distributed sourcing for IP and manufacturing. Some things like yield can (sometimes) be pushed back to the foundry, but mostly the design company owns the problem.… Read More
The great thing about competition in free markets is that vendors are always pushing their products to find an edge. You the consumer don’t have to do much to take advantage of these advances (other than possibly paying for new options). You just sit back and watch the tool you use get faster and deliver better QoR. You may think that… Read More
When I first saw that Rob Knoth (Product Director at Cadence) had proposed this topic as a subject for a blog, my reaction was “well, how accurate can that be?” I’ve been around the power business for a while, so I should know better. It’s interesting that I jumped straight to that one metric for QoR; I suspect many others will do the same.… Read More
Simulation is a broad technique spanning certainly digital logic and circuit simulation but also methods beyond these which are particularly relevant to ADAS design. In fact, much of the design of full ADAS systems begins and ends with these types of modeling. This is in part due to the need fully validate integrity and reliability… Read More
Verification coverage is a tricky concept. Ideally a definition would measure against how many paths were tested of every possible path through the complete state graph, but that goal is unimaginably out of reach for any typical design. Instead we fall back on proxies for completeness, like hitting every line in the code. This … Read More
