The complexity of silicon chips is exploding. Actually, it has been growing at a tremendous speed for decades. So far, the semiconductor industry has been successful at providing new ways to master new levels of complexity, over and over again.
Standardizing hardware platforms, using higher-level languages with a knowledge… Read More
In our quest to further enlighten the masses SemiWiki has published four books, we have two more eBooks in post production due out in Q1 2018 and two more topics in research. All of the books are available free for PDF versions or you can get printed versions on Amazon.com or free printed versions at book signings or if you happen to meet… Read More
I earlier wrote a piece to make you aware of a webinar to be hosted by Aldec on some of their capabilities for partitioning large designs for prototyping. That webinar has now been broadcast and I have provided a link to the recorded version at the end of this piece. The webinar gets into the details of how exactly you would use the software… Read More
The advantages of prototyping a hardware design on a FPGA platform are widely recognized, for software development, debug and regression in particular while the ultimate ASIC hardware is still in development. And if your design will fit into a single FPGA, this is not an especially challenging task (as long as you know your way … Read More
There’s no doubt that programmable logic in FPGAs have transformed our electronics industry for the better. If you do ASIC designs then there’s always the pressure of getting first silicon correct, with no functional or timing bugs, because bugs will cause expensive re-spins and delay time to market. ASIC designers… Read More
When talking to suppliers about their products, conversation tends to focus heavily on what they already have and why it is the answer to every imaginable need in their space. So it’s refreshing when a vendor wants to talk about where customers want to go without claiming they already have the answer wrapped up in a bow. I recently … Read More
I haven’t sat down to speak with S2C since we collaborated on the book, PROTOTYPICAL, published just before DAC 2016 and even then, I hadn’t spoken to Toshio Nakama, their CEO. Toshio splits his time between the San Jose headquarters and the Shanghai headquarters so getting time to meet face-to-face has been challenging. I was finally… Read More
This interview originally appeared as the foreword to our book “Prototypical: The Emergence of FPGA-based Prototyping for SoC Design” but I thought it would be worth publishing for those of you who have not downloaded it yet. I also wanted to mention that our friends at S2C are currently offering a 50% discount on the… Read More
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
I’ve mentioned many times what has become a very common theme in SoC and system verification – it has to be driven by the software because any concept of exhaustively verifying “everything” is neither feasible nor meaningful. Emulation has become a critical component of this flow in validating and regressing… Read More
