With the advent of large SoCs in semiconductor design space, verification of SoCs has become extremely challenging; no single approach works. And when the size of an SoC can grow to billions of gates, the traditional methods of testability of chips may no longer remain viable considering the needs of large ATPG, memory footprint,… Read More
LSI Corporationstarted in 1980s and I had several encounters with it during my jobs in 1990s; not to forget the LSI chips I used to see in desktops and other electronic systems, and I’m happy to see LSI continuing today with more vigour having leadership position in storage and networking space. It provides highly reliable, high … Read More
According to Steven Hawking, Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun orbits around our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported… Read More
In an era of SoCs with millions of gates, hundreds of IPs and multiple ways to verify designs through several stages of transformations at different levels of hierarchies, it is increasingly difficult to handle such large data in a consistent and efficient way. The hardware and software, and their interactions, have to be consistent… Read More
At the recent DVcon there was a keen focus on design verification and validation. Much of the attention is on Logic/circuit design verification, UVM, and IP verification. At the system level functional verification has improved to comprehend complex hardware and software interaction using Virtual Platforms/SystemC and Transaction… Read More
As Moore’s law started saturating on a single semiconductor die, the semiconductor community came up with the approach of growing vertically by stacking dies one above other in a 3D-IC arrangement. However, a major concern with a 3D-IC is that the heat generated by each die can get trapped in the stack, and hence it’s extremely important… Read More
The SoC designs of today are much more complex than ever in terms of number of clocks, IPs, levels of hierarchies, several modes of operations, different types of validations and checks for growing number of constraints at various stages in the design flow. As a semiconductor design evolves through several stages from RTL to layout,… Read More
As SoCs have got more complex, and with a larger and larger software content, it is no longer good enough to just monitor how the design behaves using simulation and then completely forget about it once the design is complete. What is required is the capability to monitor the design in real time (in silicon or FPGA) to see how it is behaving.… Read More
In this age of SoCs with hundreds of IPs from different sources integrated together and working at high operating frequencies, FPGA designers are hard pressed keeping up the chip reliability from issues arising out of excessive static & dynamic IR drop, power & ground noise, electro migration and so on. While the IPs are… Read More
A very popular acronym is ‘WYSIWYG’ – What You See Is What You Get! This is very true and is important to visualize things to make it better in various aspects such as aesthetics, compactness, organization, structure, understandable for correction and so on; the most important, in case of semiconductor design, is being able to identify… Read More
