Hierarchical IC design has been around since the dawn of electronics, and every SoC design today will use hierarchy for both the physical and logical descriptions. During the physical implementation of an SoC you will likely run into EDA tool limits that require a re-structure of the hierarchy. This re-partitioning will cause… Read More
We’ve been talking about the different technologies for FPGA-based SoC prototyping a lot here in SemiWiki. On the surface, the recent stories all start off pretty much the same: big box, Xilinx Virtex-7, wanna go fast and see more of what’s going on in the design. This is not another one of those stories. I recently sat down with Mick… Read More
In his blog Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood wrote: “Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it’s not. Their job is to solve problems.” Whether the tool is HTML, C, or RTL, the reality is we are now borrowing or buying more software IP than ever, and integrating it into more complex designs,… Read More
Scott Seaton is the new CEO of Oasys Design Systems. Paul van Besouw, the CEO since the company’s founding, becomes the CTO. I met Scott last year when I was doing some consulting work for Carbon Design where he was VP of sales (the new VP sales at Carbon is Hal Conklin, by the way).
I talked to Scott about why he had joined Oasys. … Read More
As RTL designs in FPGA-based ASIC prototypes get bigger and bigger, the visibility into what is happening inside the IP is dropping at a frightening rate. Where designers once had several hundred observation probes per million gates, those same several hundred probes – or fewer if deeper signal captures are needed – are now spread… Read More
FPGA-based prototyping brings SoC designers the possibility of a high-fidelity model running at near real-world speeds – at least until the RTL design gets too big, when partitioning creeps into the process and starts affecting the hoped-for results.
The average ASIC or ASSP today is on the order of 8 to 10M gates, and that includes… Read More
We’re plagued by acronyms in this business. Wikipedia defines RTL as follows: “In digital circuit design, register-transfer level (RTL) is a design abstraction which models a synchronous digital circuit in terms of the flow of digital signals (data) between hardware registers, and the logical operations performed on those… Read More
Atrenta did an online survey of their users. Of course Atrenta’s users are not necessarily completely representative of the whole marketplace so it is unclear how the results would generalize for the bigger picture, your mileage may vary. About half the people were design engineers, a quarter CAD engineers and the rest … Read More
Design for test (DFT) imposes various restrictions on the design so that the test automation tools (automatic test pattern approaches such as scan, as well as built-in self-test approaches) will subsequently be able to generate the test program. For example, different test approaches impose constraints on clock generation… Read More
FPGA-based prototype boards are a fast, cost-effective platform for SoC system validation but they are notoriously difficult to set up and to debug. There is a big upside, however, allowing early software integration and testing and thus finding bugs in both the software and the SoC earlier. This approach is much cheaper than … Read More
