As SoC design size and complexity increases, simulation alone falls farther and farther behind, even with massive cloud farms of compute resources. Hardware acceleration of simulation is becoming a must-have for many teams, but means more than just providing emulation… Read More
Wandering around DAC this week, I found much of the discussion focused on the EDA community being at an inflection point. How do we get more design starts from new places with new ideas without jeopardizing existing business? It’s not as simple a transition as it sounds.… Read More
Licensing IP can be a pain, especially when the vendor’s business model has front-loaded costs to get started. Without an easy way to evaluate IP, justifying a purchase may be tough. With more mid-volume starts coming for the IoT, wearables, automotive, and other application segments, it’s a growing concern. Flex… Read More
Increasing system complexity requires constant focus on the optimal verification methodology. Verification environments incorporate a mix of: transaction-based stimulus and response monitors, (pseudo-)random testcase generation, and ultimately, system firmware and software. RTL statement and assertion coverage… Read More
It’s very common these days to hear about a billion gates SoC, but not without a huge design and verification effort and investment of resources. A complete verification of such an SoC needs several verification steps including software and hardware based methodologies that often are not sufficient to cover the whole SoC. In order… Read More
There used to be this thing called the “computer lab”, with glowing rows of terminals connected to a mainframe or minicomputer. Computers required a lot of care and feeding, with massive cooling and power requirements. Microprocessors and personal computers appeared in the 1970s, with much smaller and less expensive machines… Read More
We hear a lot about FPGA-based prototyping hardware: Aldec, Dini Group, PRO DESIGN, Synopsys, and others. So, why is today’s news on a new platform from S2C important? It’s a matter of intent, beyond the act of gluing a few large FPGAs on a board for customers to dump more and more prospective RTL into.
Size differences aside, each … Read More
Xilinx has delivered not only “the biggest FPGA on the planet”, but what it claims is currently the world’s largest integrated circuit: the Virtex UltraScale VU440, with 19 billion transistors fabbed in TSMC 20nm. The list of first customers to receive parts says a lot about the state of SoC design today, and the vital role FPGA-based… Read More
With growing SoC size, complexity, software and hardware content in it and shrinking time-to-market, the SoC design completion in time has become increasingly dependent on IP which need to be sourced (internally or externally), customized according to the design need and integrated together into the SoC. While IP providers… Read More
As the SoC design size, complexity and functionality keeps on increasing with multiple IPs packed together and design time and time-to-market keeps on decreasing amid critical constraints on PPA, there is no other alternative than to do the design first-time-right not to miss the window of opportunity. And that could be possible… Read More
