Still thinking of Sonics as just a network-on-chip company? They are pivoting to become an SoC realization company, and in their seminar at #53DAC in Austin we saw an entirely new plan focused on heisting an extremely valuable commodity everyone else is missing.… Read More
Tag: soc design
"Re-Inventing" Tapeout Sign-off — Applying Big Data Techniques to Electrical Analysis
A common SoC design methodology in current use starts with preparation of the physical floorplan — e.g., block/pin placement, global clock domain and bus signal planning, developing the global/local power distribution (and dynamic power domain management techniques). Decoupling capacitor estimated densities and… Read More
S2C tutorial and PROTOTYPICAL debut at DAC
It’s been a busy few days here in Canyon Lake, and we’re ready to share exciting news in advance of #53DAC coming up on Monday, June 6[SUP]th[/SUP]. S2C is offering a technical program tutorial on “Overcoming the Challenges of FPGA Prototyping” followed by the launch of our latest book project, “PROTOTYPICAL”, including a field… Read More
Sonics opens new strategy for SoC energy processing
Back in February when we shared the Sonics philosophy on the ICE-Grain Power Architecture for hardware-based SoC power management, I speculated we’d know more by DAC 2016. Sonics is hitting the road with a new live seminar coming to Silicon Valley this month and Austin during DAC – and the news is big.… Read More
Tcl scripts and managing messages in ASIC & FPGA debug
Our previous Blue Pearl post looked at the breadth of contextual visualization capability in the GUI to speed up debug. Two other important aspects of the ASIC & FPGA pre-synthesis workflow are automating analysis with scripts and managing the stream of messages produced. Let’s look at these aspects… Read More
Enterprise Design Management Engineered for SoCs
In my initial look at ClioSoft’s design management system created from the ground up for the semiconductor industry, I made the opening case for managing and reusing IP across an ASIC design organization. Let’s for a moment say we agree on the need for an enterprise software package to do design management… Read More
Debugging is the whole point of prototyping
The prototype is obviously the end goal of FPGA-based prototyping, however success of the journey relies on how quickly defects can be found and rectified. Winning in the debug phase involves a combination of methodology, capability, and planning. Synopsys recently aired a webinar on their HAPS environment and its debug ecosystem.… Read More
Managing and Reusing IP in a Build-Borrow-Buy Era
Make-versus-buy inadequately describes what we do now in electronic systems design. We are on a continuum of design IP acquisition and use decisions, often with a portfolio of active projects and future projects depending on the outcome. Properly managing IP means adopting a build-borrow-buy mindset and tools capable of handling… Read More
TSMC and Flex Logix?
There was a lot to learn at the TSMC Technical Symposium last week, in the keynotes for sure but also in the halls and exhibits. Tom Dillinger did a nice job covering the keynotes in his posts Key Take aways from the TSMC Technology Symposium Part 1 and Part 2 but there was something interesting that many people may have missed in the exhibit… Read More
4 goals of memory resource planning in SoCs
The classical problem every MBA student studies is manufacturing resource planning (MRP II). It quickly illustrates that at the system level, good throughput is not necessarily the result of combining fast individual tasks when shared bottlenecks and order dependency are involved. Modern SoC architecture, particularly … Read More