EDA has always been a fiercely competitive market, no more so than in emulation where the clash of claims and counter-claims can leave those of us on the sidelines wondering who’s really on top. Sales are the obvious indicator but leadership there flips back and forth between product releases. That makes Mentor’s choice to play … Read More
I attended a Mentor verification seminar earlier in the year at which Russ Klein presented a fascinating story about a real customer challenge in debugging a power problem in a design around an ARM cluster. Here’s the story in Russ’ own words. If you’re allergic to marketing stories, read it anyway. You might… Read More
In The Times They Are A Changin’ Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan advised us to “heed the call” of change or suffer the consequences. This couldn’t be more true, considering what design and verification engineers face every day in the midst of the technological revolution.
Change has never been so rapid. And it requires we constantly adapt.… Read More
The storage market has reached what Andy Grove once described as “…a strategic inflection point.”[1] This is the stage in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.
Changing fundamentals in the storage market—where solid state drives (SSD) are now at the forefront of multiple storage applications,… Read More
Today, in the context of functional verification, industry trends are based on the needs of prominent vertical markets. There is some overlap in what these markets need, but there are some use models that are very specific to each market.
We assert this because we have a lot of customers asking about emulation solutions not from … Read More
Teams buy HDL simulation for best bang for the buck. Teams buy hardware emulation for the speed. We’ve talked previously about SCE-MI transactors as a standardized vehicle to connect the two approaches to get the benefits of both in an accelerated testbench – what else should be accounted for?… Read More
When you’re designing a hardware solution to plug into what is arguably the most complex system of all – the Internet – you can’t get away with a little fake traffic to test whether your box is going to do all the right things at the right performance. You have to model realistic voice, video, data and wireless traffic in… Read More
When the topic of hardware emulation comes up, thoughts of big iron customarily come to mind. However, hardware emulation has evolved significantly and now there are other important traits that distinguish the offerings in this area. For a very long period of time emulators provided primarily a method to accelerate gate level… Read More
Software-centric Emulation environment takes the forefront in modern SoC verification. As more and more devices are IoT enabled, the SoCs have to make special provisions to factor many things including communication, power usage, and network switching, and so on. Also, the demand for an SoC (specifically for smartphone which… Read More
To fans of Godel, Escher and Bach (the Eternal Golden Braid), there is an appealing self-referential elegance to the idea of verifying a network switch in a cloud-like resource somewhere on the corporate network. That elegance quickly evaporates however when you consider the practical realities of verifying such device in ICE… Read More
