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
The ESD Alliance collects and reports every quarter the revenue trends for both EDA and Semiconductor IP (SiP), and the biggest component for the past few years has been the SiP, as IP re-use dominates new designs. For Q4 of 2021 the total SiP revenue was $1,314.3 Million, enjoying a 24.8% growth in just one year. Here’s a chart… Read More
Synopsys Webinar | Thursday, June 23, 2022 | 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Pacific
Today’s million gates integrated circuits (ICs) involve various intellectual properties (IPs) interfacing with each other through multiple asynchronous clock and reset domains. Ensuring all clocks propagate concurrently across each clock tree
The development of the Unified Power Format (UPF) was spurred on by the need for explicit ways to enable specification and verification of power management aspects of SoC designs. The origins of UPF date back to its first release in 2007. Prior to that several vendors had their own methods of specifying power management aspects … Read More
The Accellera organization created the concept of a Unified Power Format (UPF) back in 2006, and by 2007 they shared version 1.0 so that chip designers would have a standard way to communicate the power intentions of IP blocks and full chips. By 2009 the IEEE received the Accellera donation on UPF , reviewed multiple drafts and published… Read More
Verific is an unusual company. They are completely dominant in what they do – providing parsers for Verilog/SV, VHDL and UPF. Yet they have no ambition to expand beyond that goal. Instead, per Michiel Ligthart (President and COO), they continue to “sharpen the saw”. This is an expression I learned in sales training, habit #7 from… Read More
Standards help our EDA and IP industry grow more quickly and with less CAD integration efforts, and IP-XACT is another one of those Accellera standards (1685-2009) that is coming of age, and enabling IP reuse for SoC design teams. Here at SemiWik, we’ve been writing about Defacto Technologies and their prominent use of IP-XACT… Read More
UPF was created to go beyond what HDL can do for managing on-chip power. HDLs are agnostic when it comes to dealing with supply & ground connections, power domains, level shifters, retention and other power management related elements of SoCs. UPF fills the breach allowing designers to specify in detail what parts of the design… Read More
As regular readers may know, every few months I check in with Cristian Amitroaie, CEO of AMIQ EDA, to see what’s new with the company and their products. In our posts so far this year we’ve focused on verification, and now I’m wondering how an integrated development environment (IDE) provides benefits to designers. They work on huge… Read More
I’m going to get to low power and RISC-V, but first I’m trying out virtual DAC this year. Seems to be working smoothly, aside from some glitches in registration. But maybe that’s just me – I switched email addresses in the middle of the process. Some sessions are live, many pre-recorded, not quite the same interactive experience… Read More
