Register Transfer Level (RTL) is a crucial and valuable concept in digital hardware design. Over the years, it has played a fundamental role in enabling design of complex digital chips. By abstracting away implementation details and providing a clear description of digital behavior, RTL has contributed significantly to the… Read More
Performance, Power and Area (PPA) are the commonly touted metrics in the semiconductor industry placing PPA among the most widely used acronyms relating to chip development. And rightly so as these three metrics greatly impact all electronic products that are developed. The degree of impact depends of course on the specific … Read More
The development of the Unified Power Format (UPF) was spurred on by the need for explicit ways to enable specification and verification of power management aspects of SoC designs. The origins of UPF date back to its first release in 2007. Prior to that several vendors had their own methods of specifying power management aspects … Read More
The old phrase that the cure is worse than the disease is apropos when discussing MBIST for large SOCs where running many MBIST tests in parallel can exceed power distribution network (PDN) capabilities. Memory Built-In Self-Test (MBIST) usually runs automatically during power on events. Due to the desire to speed up test and … Read More
We used to be comfortable with the idea that the worlds of logical design and physical implementation could be largely separated. Toss the logical design over the wall, and the synthesis and P&R teams would take care of the rest. That idea took a bit of a hit when we realized that synthesis had to become physically aware. The synthesis… Read More
Electronic design automation (EDA) has come a long way from its beginnings. It has enabled chip engineers from specifying designs directly in layout format during the early days to today’s capture in RTL format. Every advance in EDA has made the task of designing a chip easier and increased the design team productivity, enabling… Read More
The most obvious question here is “why do I need netlist CDC?” A lot of what you’re looking for in CDC analysis is really complex behaviors, like handshakes between different clock domains, correct gray coding in synchronizing FIFOs, eliminating quasi-static signals and the like. Deeply functional, system-level intent stuff.… Read More
I attended a session on 2.5D silicon interposer analysis at DesignCon 2020. Like many presentations at this show, ecosystem collaboration was a focus. In this session, Jinsong Hu (principal application engineer at Cadence) and Yongsong He (senior staff engineer at Enflame Tech) presented approaches for interposer power modeling… Read More
If you are designing an SOC for an IoT application and looking to minimize power consumption, there are a lot of choices. However, more often than not, looking at reducing SRAM power is a good place to start. SRAMs can consume up to 70% of an IC’s power. SureCore, a leading memory IP supplier, offers highly optimized SRAM instances … Read More
I think we’re all familiar with the cloud/edge debate on where intelligence should sit. In the beginning the edge devices were going to be dumb nodes with just enough smarts to ship all their data to the cloud where the real magic would happen – recognizing objects, trends, need for repair, etc. Then we realized that wasn’t the best… Read More
