Chiplets have been trending on SemiWiki for the past two years and I think that will continue into the distant future. As a potential way to unclog Moore’s Law, you can bet the semiconductor ecosystem will prove once again to be a chiplet force of nature driving semiconductor company roadmaps to smaller and better things.
To be clear,… Read More
A few times a year, I check in with AMIQ EDA co-founder Cristian Amitroaie to see what’s new with their company and the integrated development environment (IDE) market for hardware design and verification. Usually he suggests a topic for us to discuss, but this time I specifically wanted to learn more about the version of their Design… Read More
When I first heard the term ‘bespoke silicon,’ I had to get my dictionary out. Well versed in the silicon domain, I did not know what bespoke meant. It turns out to be a rather old-fashioned term for tailor made and seems to be very much British English. The word dates from 1583 and is the past participle of bespeak, according… Read More
We need more and more complex chips and SoCs for all new applications that use the latest technologies like AI. For example, Apple’s 5nm SoC A14 features 6-core CPU, 4 core-GPU and 16-core neural engine capable of 11 trillion operations per second, which incorporates 11.8 billion transistors, and AWS 7nm 64-bit Graviton2 custom… Read More
Dynamic event-based simulation of RTL models has traditionally been the workhorse verification methodology. A team of verification engineers interprets the architectural specification to write testbenches for various elements of the design hierarchy. Test environments at lower levels are typically exercised then … Read More
Over the past three years, I’ve spoken frequently with Cristian Amitroaie, CEO and co-founder of AMIQ EDA, to understand how the company is helping engineers cope with the challenges of chip design and verification. With their broad customer base and many years of experience in the EDA business, the folks at AMIQ really seem to … Read More
In my last blog post about AMIQ EDA, I talked with CEO and co-founder Cristian Amitroaie about their support for continuous integration (CI). We discussed in some detail how their Design and Verification Tools (DVT) Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Verissimo SystemVerilog Linter are used in CI flows. Cristian… Read More
Anyone can create a testbench[TB] and verify the design, but it can’t be simply reused as a verification IP [VIP]. So I would like to address in this article: What is VIP? How can we build a high-quality VIP? How can we verify the VIP? What else can we do to make the VIP unique and commercially more valuable?
Most of the module/IP level … Read More
In recent years, one of the hot topics in chip design and verification has been continuous integration (CI). Like many innovations in hardware development, it was borrowed from software engineering and the programming world. The concept is simple: all code changes from all developers are merged back into the main development… Read More
There’s no question that chip designs are getting more complex, driven by the power, performance, and area (PPA) demands of applications like artificial intelligence (AI), automotive, and cloud computing. This complexity, of course, trickles down to the design and testbench code. When engineers can find and fix bugs before… Read More
