Digital designers have been automating the functional verification process for many years now, however when you talk to an analog designer about how they do verification you quickly realize that the typical process is quite ad-hoc and little automated. Necessity does create an opportunity so the software engineers at Methodics… Read More
Tag: verification
Top 10 Reasons to Use Vivado Design Suite
Here are the top 10 reasons to use the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite to design your All Programmable Devices:
Reason number 10: Accelerate verification by over 100XThe Vivado Design Suite System Edition lets you do design at the C, C++ or systemC level. But a side-benefit is that you can use these languages for verification at performances… Read More
Jasper at DVCon and EJUG
The Jasper European User Group meeting (EJUG) is coming up in a couple of weeks. It will be held in the Munich Hilton (which I have stayed in many times, the S-bahn from the airport pretty much stops in the basement) on April 2nd.
The schedule for the day is:
9:00 AM – Registration and continental breakfast
9:30 AM – Jasper… Read More
Now even I can spot bad UVM
Most programmers can read a code snippet and spot errors, given enough hours in the day, sufficient caffeine, and the right lens prescription. As lines of code run rampant, with more unfamiliar third-party code in the mix, interprocedural and data flow issues become more important – and harder to spot.
Verification IP particularly… Read More
Semiconductor Strategy – From Productivity to Profitability
The semiconductor industry seems to be the most challenged in terms of cost of error; a delay of 3 months in product development cycle can reduce revenue by about 27% and that of 6 months can reduce it by almost half; competition is rife, pushing the products to next generation (with more functionality, low power, high performance,… Read More
Friday Miscellany: EDAC Mixer, DVCon, DVCon Europe
Yesterday evening was EDAC’s first mixer. I assume the first of a regular event. It was held in Mountain View in the old train station which is now the Savvy Cellar wine bar. I had a nice glass of rosé from Provence that reminded me of the years that I lived in the south of France. Some of the money we spent went to charity, to the Mountain… Read More
A Methodology for Assertion Reuse in SoC Designs
As your SoC design can contain hundreds of IP blocks, how do you verify that all of the IP blocks will still work together correctly once assembled? Well, you could run lots of functional verification at the full-chip level and hope for the best in terms of code coverage and expected behavior. You could buy an expensive emulator to … Read More
Verifying DRC Decks and Design Rule Specifications
DRVerify is part of the iDRM design rule compiler platform from Sage DA, something that I have been personally involved with for the past three years. DRVerify is mainly used to verify third party design rule check (DRC) decks and ensure that they correctly, completely and accurately represent the design rule specification. In… Read More
Verification of Power Delivery Networks
Power delivery networks (PDN) are the metal structures on a chip that delivers the power. In a high-end desktop SoC this might be delivering as much as 150W, and with voltages around 1V that means over 150 amps of current. Clearly getting the PDN correct is critical for a correctly functioning chip. One of the challenges to verifying… Read More
Speeding Up AMS Verification by Modeling with Real Numbers
My first introduction to modeling an AMS behavior using a language was back in the 1980’s at Silicon Compilers using the Lsim simulator. Around the same time the VHDL and Verilog languages emerged to handle the modeling of both digital and some analog behaviors. The big reason to model analog behavior with a language is for… Read More