RTL Designers Can Win a GoPro Camera at DAC

RTL Designers Can Win a GoPro Camera at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 04-30-2014 at 10:05 am

DACis just 33 days away and who wouldn’t want a cool GoPro camerato play with? Your manager will certainly want you to first check out what’s new at DAC if your job involves getting to RTL signoff on time and within budget. The creative folks at Atrenta have figured out how to attract us with the offer of winning a GoPro camera,… Read More


IP the eSilicon Way

IP the eSilicon Way
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2014 at 9:51 pm

Pop quiz: eSilicon has a big IP development group in what Asian country? If you didn’t know and you guessed, you probably got it wrong with China or India. It is Vietnam. In fact they have two sites. One in Ho Chi Minh City (that used to be called Saigon) and one in Da Nang.

At Electronic Design Process Symposium (EDPS) held last … Read More


Importance of Data Management in SoC Verification

Importance of Data Management in SoC Verification
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-22-2014 at 6:00 am

In an era of SoCs with millions of gates, hundreds of IPs and multiple ways to verify designs through several stages of transformations at different levels of hierarchies, it is increasingly difficult to handle such large data in a consistent and efficient way. The hardware and software, and their interactions, have to be consistent… Read More


Cadence Acquires Jasper

Cadence Acquires Jasper
by Paul McLellan on 04-21-2014 at 4:06 pm

Cadence announced today that it is acquiring Jasper Design Automation for $170M in an all-cash offer. Jasper has $24M in cash so it is really an acquisition for around $145M. i think that is around 4X revenue but I only know rumors about Jasper’s revenue numbers.

All the big 3 already have their own formal technology but the … Read More


Can the NSA Get Into Your Chip?

Can the NSA Get Into Your Chip?
by Paul McLellan on 04-21-2014 at 2:49 am

At DVCon Lawrence Loh and Viktor Markus Purri gave a tutorial on Formally Verifying Security Aspects of SoC Designs. Lawrence is the direector of WW application engineering and Markus is an FAE who specializes in security verification.

I’m not going to attempt to summarize an entire half-day tutorial in under 1000 words,… Read More


Power and Thermal Simulation in ESL Verification Flows

Power and Thermal Simulation in ESL Verification Flows
by Daniel Payne on 04-18-2014 at 8:11 pm

At the recent DVcon there was a keen focus on design verification and validation. Much of the attention is on Logic/circuit design verification, UVM, and IP verification. At the system level functional verification has improved to comprehend complex hardware and software interaction using Virtual Platforms/SystemC and Transaction… Read More


A Brief History of Functional Verification

A Brief History of Functional Verification
by Paul McLellan on 04-13-2014 at 3:00 pm

Usually these brief history pieces are totally written by the SemiWiki blogger whose name is at the top. Often me since that was how I prototyped book chapters (buy). Well, OK, I did actually write this but it is completely cribbed from a presentation earlier this week by Wally Rhines who gave a sort of keynote at the announcement of… Read More


Expert Constraint Management Leads to Productivity & Faster Convergence

Expert Constraint Management Leads to Productivity & Faster Convergence
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-12-2014 at 7:30 am

The SoC designs of today are much more complex than ever in terms of number of clocks, IPs, levels of hierarchies, several modes of operations, different types of validations and checks for growing number of constraints at various stages in the design flow. As a semiconductor design evolves through several stages from RTL to layout,… Read More


Mentor’s New Enterprise Verification Platform

Mentor’s New Enterprise Verification Platform
by Paul McLellan on 04-10-2014 at 2:01 am

I spent the morning at Mentor where they announced their new enterprise verification platform. This was a general announcement but was attended by a lot of the international press who were over on a GlobalPress tour (the event that used to take up camp at Chaminade).

But first Wally Rhines spent 30 minutes giving a nice overview of… Read More


Automating Analog Verification in Virtuoso

Automating Analog Verification in Virtuoso
by Daniel Payne on 03-31-2014 at 2:00 pm

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 MethodicsRead More