Sigasi at the 2024 Design Automation Conference

Sigasi at the 2024 Design Automation Conference
by Daniel Nenni on 06-20-2024 at 2:00 pm

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Sigasi® will demonstrate its Sigasi Visual HDL™ (SVH™) portfolio during DAC, showing how it supports the shift-left methodology for chip design, catching specification errors early in the design cycle and fixing the inefficient HDL-based design flow.

The traditional HDL workflow cannot accommodate the massive amounts of… Read More


Something new in High Level Synthesis and High Level Verification

Something new in High Level Synthesis and High Level Verification
by Daniel Payne on 06-11-2024 at 10:00 am

catapult covercheck min

As SoC complexities continue to expand to billions of transistors, the quest for higher levels of design automation also rises. This has led to the adoption of High-Level Synthesis (HLS), using design languages such as C++ and SystemC, which is more productive than traditional RTL design entry methods. In the RTL approach there… Read More


The State of FPGA Functional Verification

The State of FPGA Functional Verification
by Daniel Payne on 02-15-2023 at 10:00 am

Design Styles min

Earlier I blogged about IC and ASIC functional verification, so today it’s time to round that out with the state of FPGA functional verification. The Wilson Research Group has been compiling an FPGA report every two years since 2018, so this marks the third time they’ve focused on this design segment. At $5.8 billion… Read More


Formal Methods for Aircraft Standards Compliance

Formal Methods for Aircraft Standards Compliance
by Bernard Murphy on 09-15-2021 at 6:00 am

Avionics equipment min

When promoting adoption of formal methods in functional verification, there are two hurdles to overcome: one technical, the other people. The first is a comfortable and familiar challenge for us engineers. Take the course, pass the test, get the certificate. Very mechanical and deterministic. People on the other hand are non-deterministic… Read More


WEBINAR: Lightspeed Data Sync – Design Workspace Problems Solved!

WEBINAR: Lightspeed Data Sync – Design Workspace Problems Solved!
by Daniel Nenni on 09-02-2019 at 10:00 am

With every process node and every SOC design, engineering and IT teams are experiencing an unprecedented data explosion. User workspaces routinely exceed 10’s of GB and sometimes even 100’s of GB. Regression runs, characterization runs, design and debug of workspaces, building verification environments – all of these… Read More


The DIY Syndrome

The DIY Syndrome
by Bernard Murphy on 11-09-2017 at 7:00 am

When facing a new design objective, we check off all the established tools and flows we know we are going to need. For everything else, we default to an expectation that we will paper over the gaps with scripting, documentation and spreadsheets. And why not? When we don’t know what we will have to deal with, in documentation, scheduling,… Read More


CDC Verification for FPGA – Beyond the Basics

CDC Verification for FPGA – Beyond the Basics
by Bernard Murphy on 05-23-2017 at 12:00 pm

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


Updated tool cuts through DO-254 V&V chaos

Updated tool cuts through DO-254 V&V chaos
by Don Dingee on 02-03-2016 at 4:00 pm

Audits. The mere mention of the word keeps project managers up at night and sends most designers running. However, in the case of FPGA designs seeking DO-254 compliance, the product doesn’t ship until the audit is complete – there is no avoiding it, or skating around it.… Read More


Real FPGAs don’t eat fake test vectors

Real FPGAs don’t eat fake test vectors
by Don Dingee on 06-26-2014 at 8:00 am

Vector blasting hardware is as old as digital test methodology itself. In the days of relatively simple combinational and finite state machine logic, a set of vectors aimed broadside at inputs could shake loose most faults with observable outputs. With FPGAs, creating an effective set of artificial test vectors has become a lot… Read More


You didn’t say it has to work

You didn’t say it has to work
by Don Dingee on 04-22-2014 at 8:00 pm

“Failure to plan is planning to fail.” If that is true – and it has been quoted verbatim or slightly modified so many times throughout modern history, there has to be some truth – why does most of the engineering community seem to detest planning so much?

Engineering planning doesn’t mean whipping out a block diagram or pseudo code,… Read More