Fractal is another one of those very successful emerging EDA companies that you don’t read a lot about, except on SemiWiki. Rene Donkers is co-founder and CEO of Fractal Technologies, a company addressing IP quality assurance. This is a niche in the SoC tooling market that deserves some justification. Why not use an IP as-is… Read More
We’ve had several blogs introducing the Juno ARM Development Platform as a vehicle for ARMv8-A software development. S2C has jumped in with a module connecting their FPGA-based prototyping platform to the Juno, enabling more advanced IP… Read More
We periodically see that “software ate the world” line – I’m pretty sure I’ve used it a couple times myself. The fact is, software doesn’t run itself; never has, never will. Somewhere there has to be an underlying computer. First it was on beads, then in gears, then in tubes.… Read More
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
All the hubbub about FPGA-accelerated servers prompts a big question about cache coherency. Performance gains from external acceleration hardware can be wiped out if the system CPU cluster is frequently taking hits from cache misses after data is worked on by an accelerator.
ARM’s latest third-generation CoreLink CMN-600 … Read More
Cache evolved when the world was all about homogeneous processing and slow and expensive shared memory. Now, compute is just part of the problem – devices need to handle display, connectivity, storage, and other tasks, all at the same time. Different, heterogeneous cores handle different workflows in the modern SoC, and the burden… Read More
“Data management tools? We use small teams doing small designs. Each project only has two or three designers. Everyone uses the same EDA tools. Why do we need another tool for collaboration?” Good question. If you enjoy frequent meetings and redoing work because someone didn’t understand the status of IP blocks, the answers may… Read More
Efficient collaboration is essential to meeting tight chip design schedules. In analog and mixed signal (AMS) design, collaboration has many facets. Design tools are usually specific to roles, and handoffs are numerous, especially when moving a design to a foundry. … Read More
Several companies have attacked the QoS problem in SoC design, and what is emerging from that conversation is the best approach may be several approaches combined in a hybrid QoS solution. At the recent Linley Group Mobile Conference, NetSpeed Systems outlined just such a solution with an unexpected plot twist in synthesis.
The… Read More
Enterprise design management can be summed up in one word: collaboration. Intellectual property (IP) reuse and the success of distributed system-on-chip (SoC) design efforts depend strongly on how well designers can collaborate. As time-to-market windows have shortened, the challenges around design collaboration have… Read More
