Improving on EMACS for VHDL Creation

Improving on EMACS for VHDL Creation
by Bernard Murphy on 11-16-2016 at 7:00 am

OK – I admit I titled this piece as clickbait. There is a core of designers for whom belief in the supremacy of EMACS for RTL creation comes close to religion. Some will read only the title and jump immediately to penning searing comments questioning my intelligence, experience, parenthood and ability to tie my own shoes. Some, I hope,… Read More


Quality in Hard IP

Quality in Hard IP
by Bernard Murphy on 11-15-2016 at 7:00 am

I was CTO at Atrenta, home of SpyGlass, for many years before the company was acquired by Synopsys, so I know a thing or two about IP quality, to paraphrase a popular commercial. The problem is that even in the best-run IP shops, errors happen. Sometimes they happen on simple changes, especially when you think “This IP has been very … Read More


3 in 1 Hardware Verification

3 in 1 Hardware Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 11-14-2016 at 12:00 pm

Aldec has offered front-end EDA tools for over 30 years but may not be a familiar name to mainstream IC design engineers. That’s probably because for most that period they haven’t really targeted IC design. They have been much more focused on PC-based design for FPGAs particularly where requirements traceability has been important,… Read More


Flexible IoT Wireless

Flexible IoT Wireless
by Bernard Murphy on 11-11-2016 at 7:00 am

There’s been quite a bit of debate about what is the “best” wireless option for the IoT, coming down usually in favor of there being no single best option. Applications are so widely varied that different solutions are needed to ideally fit different requirements. However, IoT economics require we settle on a limited set of options,… Read More


Optimizing Prototype Debug

Optimizing Prototype Debug
by Bernard Murphy on 11-09-2016 at 7:00 am

In the spectrum of functional verification platforms – software-based simulation, emulation and FPGA-based prototyping – it is generally agreed that while speed shoots up by orders of magnitude (going left to right) ease of debug drops as performance rises and setup time increases rapidly, from close to nothing for simulation… Read More


Managing the IoT

Managing the IoT
by Bernard Murphy on 11-07-2016 at 4:00 pm

Now that ARM has introduced its end-to-end IoT, including the mbed Cloud SaaS to handle the cloud end of the IoT, you might wonder what service providers are going to offer on top of this solution. DevicePilot showcased one such solution at ARM TechCon, to manage connected products. These guys especially deserve to be featured because… Read More


RRAM Redux

RRAM Redux
by Bernard Murphy on 11-04-2016 at 7:00 am

Advanced memory technologies are a perennially hot topic thanks to a proliferation of data-hungry applications pushing our demand for more capacity and performance at less power and area. Among several technology contenders is Resistive RAM or RRAM (also called ReRAM). In this technology a conducting filament is grown through… Read More


AI on the Edge

AI on the Edge
by Bernard Murphy on 11-02-2016 at 7:00 am

A lot of the press we see on AI tends to be of the “big iron” variety – recognition algorithms for Facebook images, Google TensorFlow and IBM Watson systems. But AI is already on edge-nodes such as smartphones and home automation hubs, for functions like voice-recognition, facial recognition and natural language understanding.… Read More


The challenge of insecure IoT

The challenge of insecure IoT
by Bernard Murphy on 11-01-2016 at 7:00 am

An attack on Dyn (a DNS service provider) through a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack brought down Github, Amazon and Twitter for a while and is thought to have been launched through IoT devices. Hangzhou Xiongmai, a provider of webcams and the most publicly pilloried source of weakness in the attack is now recalling all… Read More


Mentor Webinar Series: Integrating the Systems Engineering Flow

Mentor Webinar Series: Integrating the Systems Engineering Flow
by Bernard Murphy on 10-28-2016 at 7:00 am

Product lifecycle management is probably not the most gripping topic for most design engineers. You want to get on with architecture, design, verification and implementation. But if you are building products for any safety-sensitive application in a car, a medical appliance, avionics, railway applications in Europe – to name… Read More