There was a comment recently that design for low power is not an event, it’s a process; that comment is absolutely correct. Power is affected by everything in the electronic ecosystem, from application software all the way down to layout and process choices. Yet power as a metric is much more challenging to model and control than … Read More
FMCAD (Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design) is a technical conference with a 20-year pedigree. This is a conference for serious formal methods teams. Key notes are from Berkeley and UCLA, committee members are all formal heavyweights and best I can tell, there is no exhibitors area.… Read More
A hot debate recently, promoted notably by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, has explored whether we should fear AI. A key question centers around the ethics of AI – how we can instill ethical values in intelligent systems we will build and how, I hope, we can ensure we use those systems ethically. This is not an academic question – autonomous… Read More
There are a lot of clever techniques to automatically find and even implement methods for register gating and memory gating, but the bulk of power-saving still depends on designer and architect insight based on expected range of use of a device, complemented by practical use-case simulations. Of course this team needs to be able… Read More
Most of what you have read about design for low power has probably focused on mobile devices where power consumption constraints tend to outweigh performance objectives. These devices use aggressive power switching strategies, based on the reasonable assumption that parts or all of the device can be powered down at any given … Read More
One of the great advantages of emulation is that runtimes are much faster than for simulation – sufficiently fast that you can really debug hardware together with software for comprehensive use-case testing. A not so great aspect is that emulators are expensive and, until relatively recently, not particularly easy to share across… Read More
Periodically, Mentor commissions a user/usage survey on Functional Verification, conducted by the Wilson Research Group, then they publish the results to all of us, an act of industry good-citizenship for which I think we owe them a round of thanks. Harry Foster at Mentor is breaking down the report into a series of 15 blogs. He’s… Read More
Building devices for the IoT has become especially challenging thanks to two conflicting requirements. The device has to be small and ultra-low power in most applications but also in many of those applications it has to provide a high-level of security, especially to defend high-value targets like smart metering, payment terminals,… Read More
This is part 3 of a series of 4 on low power design, scheduled for September 21st at 10am. Kiran Vittal and Ken Mason will be discussing using the SpyGlass Power solutions (analysis and verification) to optimize power at RTL. Atrenta always had a leading position in this area; I expect a year following their acquisition by Synopsys,… Read More
(With apologies to Pogo.) For all the great work that we are seeing in improving both software and hardware security, we – not the technology – are in many ways the weakest link in the security chain. Recent reports indicate we are surprisingly easy to fool, despite our much proclaimed awareness of risks.
In a recent experiment at … Read More
