Who Left the Lights On?

Who Left the Lights On?
by Bernard Murphy on 01-03-2017 at 7:00 am

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


Keeping It Fresh with the Veloce Deterministic ICE App

Keeping It Fresh with the Veloce Deterministic ICE App
by Rizwan Farooq on 11-02-2016 at 4:00 pm

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


New Frontiers in the Storage System Market Call for the Best of ICE and Virtual Emulation

New Frontiers in the Storage System Market Call for the Best of ICE and Virtual Emulation
by Richard Pugh on 10-26-2016 at 7:00 am

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


Market Trends Motivate a Shift-Left in Functional Verification

Market Trends Motivate a Shift-Left in Functional Verification
by Jean-Marie Brunet on 09-15-2016 at 4:00 pm

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


Striving for one code base in accelerated testbenches

Striving for one code base in accelerated testbenches
by Don Dingee on 08-26-2016 at 4:00 pm

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


Ecosystem Partnership for Effective Network Hardware Design

Ecosystem Partnership for Effective Network Hardware Design
by Bernard Murphy on 04-29-2016 at 12:00 pm

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


HW Emulator Apps Open Doors to Entirely New Uses

HW Emulator Apps Open Doors to Entirely New Uses
by Tom Simon on 02-28-2016 at 7:00 am

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


5 Verification Challenges of IoT Solved by Emulation

5 Verification Challenges of IoT Solved by Emulation
by Pawan Fangaria on 12-09-2015 at 4:00 pm

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


Networks, Emulation and the Cloud

Networks, Emulation and the Cloud
by Bernard Murphy on 11-23-2015 at 12:00 pm

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


How Virtualization Makes Network Processor Verification Efficient

How Virtualization Makes Network Processor Verification Efficient
by Tom Simon on 10-22-2015 at 7:00 am

When Ethernet was introduced in 1983 it ran at 10Mbps and mostly relied on hubs and coaxial cable. Twelve years later a faster speed was introduced, running at 100Mbps. Since then we have seen an acceleration of new data rate introductions. According top the Ethernet Alliance, Ethernet could have 12 speeds before 2020, with 6 of … Read More