Next Generation Formal Technology to Boost Verification

Next Generation Formal Technology to Boost Verification
by Pawan Fangaria on 06-08-2015 at 12:00 pm

With growing complexities and sizes of SoCs, verification has become a key challenge for design closure. There isn’t a single methodology that can provide complete verification closure for an SoC. Moreover creation of verification environment including hardware, software, testbench and testcases requires significant … Read More


A Robust Lint Methodology Ensures Faster Design Closure

A Robust Lint Methodology Ensures Faster Design Closure
by Pawan Fangaria on 06-03-2015 at 4:00 am

With the increase in SoC designs’ sizes and complexities, the verification continuum has grown larger to an extent that the strategies for design convergence need to be applied from the very beginning of the design flow. Often designers are stuck with never ending iterations between RTL, gate and transistor levels at different… Read More


Synopsys Software Integrity: Find All the Bugs

Synopsys Software Integrity: Find All the Bugs
by Paul McLellan on 05-29-2015 at 9:30 am

A couple of days ago Synopsys announced that they were acquiring Quotium’s product Seeker. This is an interactive application security testing (IAST) product. Synopsys are acquiring the product and the R&D team, not the whole of Quotium. The Seeker solution is a pioneering solution for IAST that helps businesses find high-risk… Read More


Experts Talk at Mentor Booth

Experts Talk at Mentor Booth
by Pawan Fangaria on 05-11-2015 at 7:00 pm

It’s less than four weeks to go at DAC 2015 and the program is final now. So I started investigating new technologies, trends, methodologies, and tools that will be unveiled and discussed in this DAC. In the hindsight of the semiconductor industry over the last year, I see 14nm technologies in the realization stage and 10nm beckoning… Read More


SoC Debugging Just Got a Speed Boost

SoC Debugging Just Got a Speed Boost
by Daniel Payne on 04-28-2015 at 4:00 am

Sure, design engineers can get more attention than verification engineers, but the greater number of verification engineers on SoC projects means that the verification task is a bigger bottleneck in a schedule than pure design work. A recent survey conducted at Cadence shows how verification effort can be divided into several,… Read More


A Comprehensive Power Optimization Solution

A Comprehensive Power Optimization Solution
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-20-2015 at 7:00 am

In an electronic world driven by smaller devices packed with larger functions, power becomes a critical factor to manage. With power consumption leading to heat dissipation issues, reliability of the device can be affected, if not controlled or the device not cooled. Moreover, for mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets… Read More


Verification IP for PCIe and AXI4

Verification IP for PCIe and AXI4
by Daniel Payne on 03-26-2015 at 2:00 pm

Engineers love acronyms and my latest blog post has three acronyms in the title alone, so hopefully you are doing or considering SoC designs with the AMBA AXI4(Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) interface specification along with PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express). One big motivation for using semiconductor… Read More


SystemC Co-Simulation of NoCs and IP Blocks

SystemC Co-Simulation of NoCs and IP Blocks
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2015 at 7:00 am

Verification in general suffers from a couple of fundamental problems. Availability of models and performance of different levels of representation.

The first problem, availability of models, is that you would like to start verification as soon as possible but all the representations are not ready early enough. Obviously … Read More


CDC Verification: A Must for IP and SoCs

CDC Verification: A Must for IP and SoCs
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-12-2015 at 1:00 pm

In the modern SoC era, verification is no longer a post-design activity. The verification strategy must be planned much earlier in the design cycle; otherwise the verification closure can become a never ending problem. Moreover, verification which appears to be complete may actually be incomplete because of undetected issues… Read More


How many coats cover this SoC?

How many coats cover this SoC?
by Don Dingee on 03-11-2015 at 7:00 pm

“Most interior paint covers with one coat.” Back when there was something called a newspaper, this was an actual blurb in the home improvement pages, section 3, part 8, page 5 of the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, August 13, 1961. Even then, marketers were catering to consumers looking to cut corners and save time, and one-coat coverage… Read More