Without data, there is no computing field to talk about, no technology world to awe at and not much of a semiconductor industry to work in. There is no argument that data is the foundational piece for everything, has been to date and will continue to be. While processing an application’s input data is essential to serve the intended… Read More
The dream of 100% confidence is compelling for silicon engineers. We all want that big red button to push that magically finds all of our bugs for us. Verification, after all, accounts for roughly two-thirds of logic design effort. Without that button, we have to create reference models,… Read More
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a widely known adage across the world. Recognizing patterns and cycles becomes easier when data is presented pictorially. Naturally, data visualization technology has a long history from the early days, when people used a paper and pencil to graph data, to modern day visualization platforms.… Read More
Verification as an effectively unbounded problem will always stir debate on ways to improve. A natural response is to put heavy emphasis on making existing methods faster and more seamless. That’s certainly part of continuous improvement but sometimes we also need to step back and ask the bigger questions – what is sufficient … Read More
After knowing about the challenges involved in validating multicore systems and domains of system and application level tracing as explained by Don Dingee in his article “Tracing methods to multicore gladness” which is based on the first part of Mentor Embedded multicore whitepaper series, it’s time to take a deeper insight … Read More
In EDA arena we often find companies providing customization platforms along with the tools they offer to their customers. I admire such companies because they equip the end users of a tool to extend its functionality as they like according to their environment, thus increasing the designer productivity significantly. And I’m… Read More
Ground. It’s that little downward-pointing triangle that somehow works miracles on every schematic. It looks very simple until one has to tackle modern power distribution network (PDN) design on a board with high speed and high power draw components, and you soon discover ground is a complicated fairy tale with a lot of influences.… Read More
The state machine nature of many digital designs has made time-domain debugging the favorite tool for most designers. We provide a set of inputs, data gets clocked in, and a set of outputs appears. We look for specific patterns in parallel paths, or sequences on serial lines.… Read More
