As if engineers did not have enough difficulty just getting everything right so that their designs are implemented functionally correct, the demands of lowering power consumption require changes that can affect functionality and verification. Techniques such as power gating, clock gating, mixed supply voltage, voltage … Read More
Synopsys seems to particularly excel at these events, whether in half-day tutorials at conferences or, as in this case, in a full-day on-site workshop. You might think there’s not much that can be added in this domain, other than to bring low-power newbies up to speed, but you’d be wrong. This event set the stage with surveys on needs… Read More
We already know that IP-Xact is extremely useful for managing IP and SOC design specifications, yet it may come as a surprise to learn that it also can be used to form the basis of a power flow too. There are design tools that read UPF to help implement and verify designs, however it can be extremely useful to understand the interplay … Read More
I recently had a call with Rob Dekker, Founder and CTO of Verific. If you’re in EDA or semiconductor CAD, chances are high that you know who they are. They’re king of the hill in parser software for SystemVerilog and VHDL. When you hear a line like that, you assume a heavy dose of marketing spin, but here it really is fact. I don’t know of… Read More
AMIQ EDA has caught my attention over the last few months. My first impression was that this was just another small IDE company trying to compete with established and bundled IDEs from the big 3, a seemingly insurmountable barrier. This view was challenged by an impressive list of testimonials, not just from the little guys but also… Read More
I normally think of shift left as a way to move functional verification earlier in design, to compress the overall design cycle. But it can also make sense in other contexts, one particularly important example being power intent verification.
If you know anything about power intent, you know that it affects pretty much all aspects… Read More
Mixed-signal design creates all sorts of interesting problems for implementation and verification flows, particularly when it comes to design for low power. We tend to think of mixed-signal as a few blocks like PLLs, ADCs and PHYs on the periphery of the design. Constrain and verify the digital power requirements up to analog … Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES has been evangelizing their 22FDX FD-SOI process for a few months; readers may have seen Tom Simon’s write-up of their preview at ARM TechCon. Dr. Joerg Winkler recently gave an updated webinar presentation of their approach in an implementation of ARM Cortex-A17 core.
By now, you’ve probably heard that 22FDX… Read More
In early 2000s, semiconductor design at RTL level was gaining momentum. The idea was to process more design steps such as insertion of test and other design structures upfront at the RTL level. The design optimization and verification were to be done at the RTL level to reduce long iterations through gate level design because changes… Read More
One of the most exciting recent developments in low power design and verification is the successive refinement flow developed by ARM® and Mentor Graphics®.… Read More
