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


Top 10 Reasons to Use Vivado Design Suite

Top 10 Reasons to Use Vivado Design Suite
by Paul McLellan on 03-23-2014 at 7:05 am

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

Jasper at DVCon and EJUG
by Paul McLellan on 03-13-2014 at 7:05 pm

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

Now even I can spot bad UVM
by Don Dingee on 03-11-2014 at 8:30 pm

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

Semiconductor Strategy – From Productivity to Profitability
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-08-2014 at 8:30 am

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


Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler

Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler
by Paul McLellan on 03-04-2014 at 8:00 am

Integration is often an underrated attribute of good tools, compared to raw performance and technology. But these days integration is differentiation (try telling that to your calculus teacher). Today at DVCon Synopsys announced Verification Compiler which integrates pretty much all of Synopsys’s verification technologies… Read More