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March 16, 2016

You can see it if you look SXSW

You can see it if you look SXSW
by Don Dingee on 03-16-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Mobile

Watching worlds of mobility, entertainment, and social media collide and helping customers navigate through this new technological landscape has been my passion for the last few years since I founded Left2MyOwnDevices. As a new arrival in Texas, I had my first chance to see just how big the convergence is at the premier event in Austin this week: SXSW.

“Oh, that’s not a technology show, it’s a music festival.” I heard similar disparaging remarks tossed at CES a decade ago. Many said it was just a TV and camera show, until the major players in semiconductor, mobile, and software showed up in force and brought the automotive and healthcare folks along for the ride. Those who think of SXSW only as a cultural event and not a place for technologists (the SXSW Interactive portion) are missing the picture.

SXSW does have a different feel to it. It’s not an exhibit-based “show” in the sense that you just walk into a convention center and wander around a bunch of booths. There certainly is that component; the Austin Convention Center, where we will be for DAC in June, is probably my favorite tradeshow venue. There were a suitable number of vendors on display – we didn’t actually have badges to take a look inside. (I wasn’t even planning on going to SXSW this week; we closed on our new home here on Friday and couldn’t take possession until Monday, so my daughter and son-in-law suggested we just go look around for a bit.)

However, I was amazed at just how much of SXSW was accessible without a badge. The event takes over the Austin entertainment district between 4[SUP]th[/SUP] and 6[SUP]th[/SUP] Streets for blocks. Most of the bars and restaurants were configured for various panel discussions. For instance, the very first place we arrived was the Pandora House – many establishments are rebranded with sponsor signage for the week. On stage there was a panel, including heavy hitters from both Pandora and Verizon, discussing the impact of virtual reality on real-world events as a new channel for artists and festivals.

Then we moved down a few buildings to the Mashable complex, actually several buildings and a courtyard. My kids asked, “Do you know anyone at Mashable?” I pointed to @LanceUlanoff on the social media board, chuckling a bit. (Later in the day we stumbled on another panel discussing diversity in healthcare research, and the three twentysomething female panelists proposed the hashtag #NotAllOldWhiteGuys – but they were quick to point out that some of us get it, or at least a good portion of it. I’ve never been one of the cool kids, it’s OK.)

They immediately recognized the Amazon logo and ran over to their display for Amazon Launchpad – send a Tweet, get a t-shirt. I went the other direction to a booth I recognized, one with a familiar logo but a rather cryptic display:

I can recommend a good book about those chips you can’t see inside your phones. Qualcomm was showing an augmented reality demo one could view with a tablet. Also scattered around the downtown area were similar panels and displays from Facebook, Google, IBM, Samsung and more. Most of the new media outlets were there as well; in addition to Mashable, Fast Company had taken over a restaurant. Even McDonald’s was sponsoring a restaurant just outside of the convention center. SXSW has long been a haven for startups, but the large corporations with a major social presence are now seeing the benefits of being there.

One of the startups I ran into was Bolt Motorbikes, with CEO Josh Rasmussen showing his creation on a hotel patio for passers-by. Bolt is right up against the Vespa, without the European panache – short range, urban transport on a more serious looking bike without the license and insurance requirements of a motorcycle. Rasmussen has drawn on Tesla-like battery and charging technology, with removable battery packs which can be taken into an office for charging, and regenerative braking to extend the driving distance (between 30 and 40 miles at up to 45 mph).

We all noticed the huge Chris Hardwick sign on another building (and I missed @Midnight this week, still waiting for the DIRECTV installer as I write this). I was then able to one-up my kids on coolness for a change – one of my other favorite TV shows had a large presence. I’m definitely a ‘1’, while my kids are looking up this show to binge Season 1:

One message I’d have everyone in this industry take away: this is what our customers look like today, and going forward.

They’ve grown up with MP3 downloads and smartphones and game consoles and satellite radio and streaming video. These are the customers we’re designing for, be it mobile, or automotive, or IoT, or wearables. They are consuming content from multiple channels and telling all their friends on social media. Anyone who doesn’t embrace these changes will get run over by them. The thing is, if you’ve been going to just the established electronics and EDA shows, you may not appreciate the degree of changes we’re dealing with – I know this was an eye-opener for me.

Welcome to fsociety, y’all. Look me up next time you’re in central Texas.

March 16, 2016

Why Can’t My Car be Like My iPhone?

Why Can’t My Car be Like My iPhone?
by Roger C. Lanctot on 03-16-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, Security

Car companies must gaze with envy at Apple in the midst of its current confrontation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the U.S. over access to data on the iPhone of a terrorist. If only, they must say, if only we had Apple-like security for our cars.

By and large, when law enforcement agencies around the world need or want to extract data from a car they simply tear it apart, open it up and download it. The car maker very likely won’t even get a courtesy call.

Driving history, recent destinations, recent phone numbers called, contacts, you name it. If the driver or passengers paired their phones with the car, it’s all in there. One can only assume that the authorities have already torn apart the car owned by the shooters in San Bernadino, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. But the episode highlights the vast gulf that exists between handset security and automotive security.

For the most part, car companies concerned with vehicle security are focused on defeating thieves who are focused on stealing, spoofing or amplifying and redirecting wireless signals from keyfobs. Very little effort has been extended to the security hygiene of the connected systems inside the cars.

You can’t blame the car companies, really. With the requirement to keep the on-board diagnostic port open and available it almost seems pointless to try to secure the rest of the car. But car companies are trying. They must.

But imagine cars being so secure that investigators would have to ask permission to extract data. Today, a cottage industry is rapidly emerging around hacking cars – all over the world. Only it’s not called hacking. It’s called “reverse engineering.”

People reverse engineer cars for sport and the more they do the easier it seems to get and the less time seems to be required. Car companies are moving to create gateways to seal off the OBDII ports and to explore the creation of separate high speed CANbus networks. But these efforts are taking time and even if successful, the vulnerability of cars is likely to persist.

It hasn’t been that big of a concern before now. Cars weren’t gathering much data in the past. But now cars are building contextual information around driving history, vehicle performance, and personal information as connected cars and smartphones exchange and fuse multiple data sources and connected systems are used to manage customer relationships.

In the end, the iPhone itself may remain secure, but the car will become a four-wheeled snitch for the guilty and innocent alike. The most obvious example of this vulnerability and sloppiness in the automotive industry is the rental car with the previous driver’s call record in the head unit. As a first step toward establishing some half decent security hygiene, car makers need to start erasing smartphone data after the phones are disconnected.

But better disclosure and opt in procedures are needed along with explanations at the point of sale. Of course, the less information that is gathered from the customer in the first place, the better. But cars themselves will soon be scanning their surroundings and even scanning drivers and passengers with cameras in the cabin. Will this data be uploaded or discarded? Hard to say – the industry has yet to define a consistent policy.

And until the industry confronts its vulnerability in a forthright manner, pledges and promises to adhere to government guidelines are meaningless. While everyone is looking for Apple to make a car, maybe the automotive industry ought to look into what it takes to make an iPhone. It seems we have a lot to learn.

Can you really address the Automotive market with AP designed for smartphone?

Can you really address the Automotive market with AP designed for smartphone?
by Eric Esteve on 03-16-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Automotive, IP, NetSpeed Systems

If you remember, when TI decided to exit the booming wireless segment in 2012, the company decided to re-focus their application processor product line (OMAP) initially developed for smartphone “to a broader market including industrial clients like carmakers”. Being a TI employee in the 90’s in south of France, where TI has started the very successful wireless venture, I was feeling sad as it was the end of an amazing story. But I understood the business reasons and thought that it was a wise decision.

But the investment made by TI to develop OMAP had been huge, developing OMAP5 could be counted in thousands man.year, and the idea to target industrial market seems to be attractive. I was sharing this view, but I realize that I was naïve when thinking you can pick-up an existing SoC initially developed for wireless and decide to target automotive applications. These three words tell you why this was a naïve view: Reliability, Availability, Serviceability or RAS. The car pictured below is 58 years old. Do you really think that we will be able to use the first iPhone in 2065, even assuming that the proper network will be available?

One of Netspeed’ customers is a diversified company developing complex chips addressing server, automotive, and industrial market segments. Supporting automotive applications requires three criteria, safety, security, and reliability to outperform almost any other application. Safety because an automobile is a life-critical system, security because you don’t want to allow any malware to penetrate this system, and finally reliability as we all expect our car to be failure-free for years if not decades.

But SoC targeting certain automotive applications can be as complexes as application processors, integrating multiple CPU/GPU/DSP cores, which creates the need to design cache-coherent solutions. The company’s previous SoC was coherent, but the coherency solution was severely lacking flexibility and offered only limited configurability. The company’s new SoC architecture was targeting an increase in coherent bandwidth as well as the maximum possible flexibility, including a highly configurable coherency solution with design choices in multiple dimensions. To reach the lowest possible latency, the coherency architecture needed to scale with the number of coherency modules.

On top of these design challenges, which can be shared by SoC targeting other markets, comes the requirement to meet the ISO 26262 standard, specifically defined for the automotive market. To meet this high-reliability standard, architects wanted to provide a rich set of enterprise-class RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) features. Reliability can be linked with the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and high reliability means the longest possible time before the system produces wrong outputs. Availability is the amount of time a device is actually operating as the percentage of total time it should be operating. Serviceability defines the simplicity and speed with which a system
can be repaired.

Since the company needed a coherency solution that was both highly configurable and fully scalable, NetSpeed was an obvious candidate since its Gemini NoC IP is the only product on the market that addresses both of these requirements. In fact, Gemini can satisfy requirements for both coherent and non-coherent designs and can also handle designs with a mix of coherent and non-coherent traffic. The company needed superior performance on coherent fabric to create differentiation from the competition. NetSpeed’s solution enabled it to meet its aggressive target of 100% increase in coherency bandwidth. Compared with the previous generation, the new SoC with NetSpeed’s superior coherency directory solution delivered ultra-low latency for the system, offering 25% improvement.

When deadlocks occur in a smartphone AP, it’s painful, but not tragic as you can simply reset the system by using On/Off button. Avoiding deadlocks can be life-critical for an automotive SoC! Using patented algorithms and formal methods to design NoCs that are correct-by-construction, NocStudio generated an architecture that was deadlock-free at the application level.

If you consider the long list of challenges directly linked with this SoC target application, automotive, you better understand why picking-up a smartphone AP and re-target this SoC to support the automotive market is attractive… but naïve. The SoC architect would have to rethink the architecture in respect with RAS requirements and flexible cache-coherency support, avoiding unacceptable deadlocks. Netspeed’ NocStudio would be the right cache-coherent NoC generator to help building such an automotive SoC.

This blog has been inspired by NetSpeed “Automotive SoC” Success Stories. You can read more about this story and Mobile AP, Networking, Digital Home SoC or Data Center Storage stories here

From Eric Esteve from IPNEST

March 15, 2016June 17, 2019

Attending DAC in Austin for Free

Attending DAC in Austin for Free
by Daniel Payne on 03-15-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: EDA, Events

I love getting a good deal, and free is always compelling, so how about attending DAC in Austin for free this year? Sound too good to be true? Thanks to the generosity of three EDA companies – ATop Tech, ClioSoft and OneSpin, now you can can attend parts of DAC for free by registering here. This is now the 8th year that the I LOVE DAC offer has been going on, and the only thing that changes each year is which EDA companies decide to band together and make it happen.

With I LOVE DAC you get to attend the following on Monday – Wednesday, June 6-8, 2016:

Keynotes (NXP Semiconductors, NVIDIA Corporation, Univ. of Texas at Austin)
DAC Pavilion (SKYTalks, Fireside CEO Chats, three Teardowns, Austin Angle talks, daily panels )
Exhibits with 180 booths
IoT Exhibit
NXP Cup US Finals
Networking receptions (Sunday night, Monday – Wednesday Post Session receptions, Monday-Tuesday networking receptions, Wednesday Work-in-progress poster sessions)
Designer/IP Track Poster Sessions
Silicon Technology Art Show on Monday
Food Court

In the EDA and IP world the DAC event is a big deal because of the technical, academic, business and marketing networking that goes on. Attendees at DAC come from over 1,000 organizations, and you’ll find system designers, architects, logic designers, circuit designers, CAD managers, verification engineers, managers, executives, researchers, academics, and consultants that blog like me.

When you get this deal then make sure to stop by and thank Eric Thune at ATop Tech in booth #1648, Ranjit Adhikary of ClioSoft in booth #519, and Dave Kelf at OneSpin in booth #1249.

This offer is limited in time, so register by May 18th, 2016 to get into DAC for free.

I’ll be at DAC in Austin again this year, visiting with EDA vendors to learn what’s new with their SPICE circuit simulators and IC implementation tools, attending presentations at breakfast-lunch-dinner, live tweeting, live blogging, and in general not getting enough sleep from Sunday through Wednesday. I’d love to meet you during the many networking receptions and hear your views on the state of our semiconductor and EDA industry, off the record of course, unless I’m typing on my iPad – then it’s getting blogged.

About DAC
The Design Automation Conference (DAC) is recognized as the premier event for the design of electronic circuits and systems and for electronic design automation (EDA). Members of a diverse worldwide community from more than 1,000 organizations attend each year, represented by system designers and architects, logic and circuit designers, validation engineers, CAD managers, senior managers and executives, and researchers and academicians from leading universities. Close to 60 technical sessions selected by a committee of electronic design experts offer information on recent developments and trends, management practices and new products, methodologies and technologies. A highlight of DAC is its exhibition and suite area with approximately 200 of the leading and emerging EDA, silicon, intellectual property (IP) and design services providers. The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDA Consortium), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and is supported by ACM’s Special Interest Group on Design.

March 15, 2016June 14, 2019

Software-Driven Verification and Portable Stimulus

Software-Driven Verification and Portable Stimulus
by Bernard Murphy on 03-15-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Cadence, EDA

I was at every single lunch at DVCon, not because the food was that great (it wasn’t bad) but because the topics were all interesting. The Wednesday lunch, hosted by Cadence, was a panel on software-driven verification and portable stimulus, moderated by Frank Schirrmeister (a different role for Frank – he’s usually a panel member and doing most of the talking ;)). What follows is a condensation of many comments from the panelists, the audience and Frank (I also had a chance to talk with him after the panel).

Why do we need these approaches?
Because software and hardware have become completely intertwined in electronic products. You can’t separate verification between these domains any longer, which means that software is the right way and in some cases the only way to drive realistic use-cases. But we also need to be able to drive subset use-cases down to lower levels of design. And we need to be able to randomize to get a reasonable sense of system-level coverage, which is why the portable stimulus (PS) standard is important.

As hardware becomes more complex, you accept out of necessity that not all bugs are created equal – you want to find the most harmful by exercising the hardware in the way it will be used. Consider some obvious cases where you have to model the software to verify the hardware: you increasingly need firmware just to get out of reset, power management is largely driven by software and cache coherency correctness can only be determined when linked to realistic software use-cases. Proving the hardware will play nice with the software requires software models and scenarios which can be used in these lower-level hardware tests.

To approach this systematically, we need to define system level coverage. Unsurprisingly, this starts from software-driven verification. Begin with basic firmware coverage: function and line-coverage. In graph-based/declarative approaches, coverage of the graph is another metric (a more complete version of branch coverage). Then there should be metrics associated with external factors, such as high interrupt rates. And you want to be able to randomize over these factors, something PS aims to enable through vendor tools.

It’s also worth considering the role played by big data analytics. We’re already at a point where system-level behavior may be sufficiently complex that escapes are possible even in software driven approaches. Data mining and analytics may provide a way to detect rare or unexpected behaviors that would otherwise be missed.

Are we ready?
Frank and others believe this direction is going to force verification engineers out of their comfort zones (hardware towards software and vice-versa). How do we organize and educate for that shift? At one level executives and business priorities can force a shift – adapt or die – but we can do things to ease this transition.

Frank feels we’re making great strides on the technology side. We’re finding commonalities between engines and disciplines, we have cockpits to debug hardware and software together and we have unified interfaces to different verification platforms. We also have verification IP portable between emulation and simulation and we can collect coverage from all sources through verification management so we can see and drive progress on overall coverage goals. Adoption is, at least for now, gated more by organizational limitations.

There are some promising signs. A power engineer understands how sequences affect the task, as does a cache-coherency engineer, so they’re motivated to communicate in structured ways with the software team and then to find ways to automate that communication. But there are still challenges. One idea that ought to be reasonable is to get the virtual platform model ready very early (to drive subsequent verification). But Frank has seen cases where even when that was done, the software team couldn’t take advantage of it because they were tied up in finishing the last project – an organization problem.

However you parse this, it is clear that product designers and tool vendors are jointly searching for the way through to the promised land of system verification. These are interesting times.

You can learn more about the Cadence system-level verification solutions HERE.

TSMC and ARM Serving up 7nm!

TSMC and ARM Serving up 7nm!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-15-2016 at 10:00 am
Categories: Arm, Foundries, IP, TSMC

One thing I learned while writing the books about TSMC and ARM is that collaboration has always been at the core of both companies. They started with collaboration on day one and it is now a natural part of their business models. And the word collaboration in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem gets redefined at every process node, absolutely.

As I write this I am in the lobby of the Hilton at the San Jose Convention Center waiting for the 22[SUP]nd[/SUP] annual TSMC Technical Symposium to start. This event is unique as it is invitation only for TSMC collaboraters (customers and partners). The Toms (Tom Simon and Tom Dillinger) and I will be covering it live for SemiWiki so stay tuned.

One of the more interesting press releases to come out before the event is the one highlighting the TSMC and ARM collaboration on 7nm. Interesting because it focuses on the server market (high-performance compute) which should be a very big swing for the fabless semiconductor ecosystem.

ARM and TSMC Announce Multi-Year Agreement to Collaborate on 7nm FinFET Process Technology for High-Performance Compute

The first book we published was a brief history of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. I really have to thank Intel for the motivation on that book. Remember when Mark Bohr of Intel said, “The fabless model is collapsing”? This was back in 2012 and referenced TSMC 20nm. Today TSMC will talk about 16FFC, 10nm, and 7nm, all of which will signal for the first time a process lead change from IDM to foundry. So not only was the fabless business model NOT collapsing, it is now challenging the feasibility of the IDM model.

The second book we published is a detailed history of ARM followed by brief histories of Apple, Samsung, and Qualcom. This is an SoC focused book documenting the billions of ARM enabled devices. In the epilogue we talk about how ARM gets to the trillions of devices and that of course brings us to IoT, which is what our third book is about.

Will there be a fourth SemiWiki book? Well, we are looking for topics right now with the leading candidate being the server market and this is why:

“Existing ARM-based platforms have been shown to deliver an increase of up to 10x in compute density for specific data center workloads,” said Pete Hutton, executive vice president and president of product groups, ARM. “Future ARM technology designed specifically for data centers and network infrastructure and optimized for TSMC 7nm FinFET will enable our mutual customers to scale the industry’s lowest-power architecture across all performance points.”

“TSMC continuously invests in advanced process technology to support our customer’s success,” said Dr. Cliff Hou, vice president, R&D, TSMC. “With our 7nm FinFET, we have expanded our Process and Ecosystem solutions from mobile to high performance compute. Customers designing their next generation high-performance computing SoCs will benefit from TSMC’s industry-leading 7nm FinFET, which will deliver more performance improvement at the same power or lower power at the same performance as compared to our 10nm FinFET process node. Jointly optimized ARM and TSMC solutions will enable our customers to deliver disruptive, first-to-market products.”

Now that the foundries have the process lead and 64-bit ARM technology has a significant price/power/performance advantage over other architectures, I see the sever market as being the next big Fabless v. IDM battlefield. Remember, at the 2015 ARM TechCon it was stated that ARM is predicting a 25% server market share by 2020. SemiWiki is totally on board with this strategy and, if successful, it will certainly make a good book.

March 15, 2016

SPIE – Interview with Greg Mcintyre of IMEC

SPIE – Interview with Greg Mcintyre of IMEC
by Scotten Jones on 03-15-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Events, Foundries

One of the things I really like about major technical conferences is the opportunity to meet with people for networking and interviews. On Wednesday at the Advanced Lithography Conference I had the opportunity to interview Greg Mcinttyre, the director of advanced patterning at IMEC.

IMEC researchers are the first author on 32 to 33 papers at this years SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference with the papers split evenly between EUV, SAQP and DSA.

DSA (directed self-assembly) – IMEC presented 14 papers on DSA. DSA has the highest potential for near term insertion with memory the most interested in DSA implementation. A DSA line/space approach is defectivity limited. A templated via approach can be done with grapho-epitaxy. EUV templates for a templated via can change a double litho-etch (LE) to a single LE. Electrical testing of templated via taken through to electrical test looks as expected with performance tracking hole size. The biggest challenge is defectivity. Memory is expected to use this approach first because it is more defect tolerant. DSA needs to fit into an environment designed for multi-patterning. They are looking at different materials to make DSA fit into today’s design environment. The first DSA symposium in Belgium this year. Survey says 2 to 5 years before DSA insertion. Current XSADP going to XSAQP could be replaced with DSA. Some DRAMs have been made with DSA.

EUV – they have a program looking at alternate materials. They have an ASML NXE3300, materials, masks, and pellicles and they are looking at integration. The alternate materials program has multiple partners including inprea, and JSR, and they are looking at metallic concepts, adding metallic sensitizer to chemically amplified photoresist. They are looking at dry develop rinses or adding material that stays in during dry to prevent collapse until you etch it away. They want to understand the latest chemically amplified photoresist capability. As you lower a dose you get more shott noise so they are looking at smoothing in etch tools from TEL and Lam. DSA offers contact hole smoothing on a track.

For pellicles they have an initial solution for 40 to 80 watts full field with 85% single pass transmission. Silicon based pellicles are likely limited to 80 to 100 watts. They are investigating alternate films with carbon nanotube meshes that provide strong mechanical strength and transmission but lack chemical stability in hydrogen. Graphene and silicon nitride films with DSA for holes to improve transmission and mechanical stress in the film are also being looked at. Carbon based films are very promising.

EUV versus 193i integration. EUV imaging is clearly superior and pattern fidelity is there. Throughput, roughness and critical dimension (CDU) are key issues. One EUV layer can replace 3 argon fluoride immersion (ArFi) layers for 32nm IMEC N7.

Metal contamination of scanner, etch and track so far looks OK.

Nigh-NA system, anamorphic was a big breakthrough!

EUV insertion around 2018, if N7 is late 2017 (authors note, this is TSMC’s target) then N5 plus N7 cost reduction. The biggest push is from logic. 2D metal is worth a node but then at the next node you are back to 1D. 1D offers better electrical performance and simpler design rules. EUV most likely to be used for single exposure BEOL and as a cut mask for SAQP in the FEOL to replace multiple cut masks.

SAQP (self aligned quadruple patterning) – well controlled 22nm pitch fins with sub nanometer pitch waling. 22nm pitch is ~N5. The big SAQP is process control with CD and roughness varying with height. You need to control every process step, core 1, spacer 1, etc. They are working with ASML and Lam tuning the scanner and the etcher. Just the scanner or etch optimization gets 0.8nm CDU three sigma but co-optimization gets 0.6nm CDU three sigma.

Multi-beam eBeam – they are not focused on eBeam. He thinks multi-beam wafers is a big challenge but multi-beam for masks seems more likley.

Device Technology – Aaron Theon is presenting on the future of new devices. Horizontal nanowires look promising to replace FinFETs. Vertical nanowires versus horizontal nanowires depends on the design with vertical offering better gate length control.

March 14, 2016

Speaking about the Internet of Trust on April 21

Speaking about the Internet of Trust on April 21
by Don Dingee on 03-14-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: EDA, IoT

Five minutes to ruin a reputation built over 20 years, as Warren Buffett put it, holds true in personal relationships. On the Internet of Things, reputations can disappear in five seconds. How do we move from merely intelligent Things to a level where devices have to be Trusted? Continue reading “Speaking about the Internet of Trust on April 21”

March 14, 2016June 14, 2019

Mentor Extends Verification Offering!

Mentor Extends Verification Offering!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-14-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA, Siemens EDA

With verification consuming more and more of the design cycle and the increasingly complex industry standard interfaces that are now common place, Verification IP (VIP) is again a trending topic. Back in my IP days the age old question was: Is it better to use VIP from the IP vendor? Because you know it will work, right? Or is it better to use independent VIP that is used by multiple IP vendors because you REALLY know it will work?

I had this discussion again at DVCon amongst the masses and the consensus was that independent VIP is preferred, to which I wholeheartedly agree with but quite often VIP is bundled in with the IP if the vendor has both. In fact, that type of bundling seriously thinned the independent VIP herd which was quite apparent at the exhibit hall this year. The other crushing competitive force is the integration of VIP into the mainstream verification cycle including emulation.

For further clarification I met with Mark Olen and Jason Polychronopoulos from Mentor’s Verification Division. Mark and Jason are both very interesting men and very approachable so if you have any questions for them put it in the comment section and I will make sure you get a response.

Mark and Jason were at DVCon to push the availability of the:

First entirely native UVM SystemVerilog memory verification IP library for all commonly used memory devices, configurations, and interfaces. Mentor is adding over 1600 memory models to theMentor[SUP]®[/SUP] Verification IP(Mentor VIP) library that already supports over 60 commonly used peripheral interfaces and bus architectures. As a result, Mentor becomes the first company to supply ASIC and FPGA SoC designers with a complete UVM SystemVerilog verification IP library that covers the breadth of their peripheral interface, bus protocol and memory device needs. Providing the complete library in one consistent industry-standard format reduces the time it takes for engineers to set up verification runs, so they can focus on verifying unique, high-value parts of their designs.

“The vast majority of ASIC and FPGA project teams have moved to standard UVM SystemVerilog verification methodology, and until now have been unable to find a universal VIP library that supports bus protocols, peripheral interfaces, and memory devices, all in native UVM,” says Mark Olen, Mentor Graphics product marketing manager, Design Verification Technology Division. “Judging from initial adoptions of our new memory VIP library, it’s easy to see why verification IP is one of the fastest growing sub-segments in the functional verification market, now exceeding $110 million in annual spending, according to the Electronic Design Automation Consortium.”

We went through the slides, which they were nice enough to give me so you can find them HERE. The key takeaway from our discussion is two-fold for me: First and foremost Mentor is the leader in verification and VIP is now an integral part of that. Second, Mentor does not compete with their IP partners so not only do they have an early and intimate relationship with ARM, Northwest Logic, PLDA, etc…, Mentor also offers truly independent IP verification.

Again, post questions in the comment section and I will make sure they are answered, absolutely.

March 14, 2016

Mobile Will Disrupt These Industries Next

Mobile Will Disrupt These Industries Next
by Matt Crampton on 03-14-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Mobile
1 Comment

Technologists from across the globe recently gathered in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, the annual conversation on connectivity and celebration of new gadgets. While the conference traditionally focuses on phones, the discussions about mobile—in Barcelona and beyond—have grown increasingly wide-ranging as mobile technologies continue to seep into more areas of daily life. As one journalist covering the conference eloquently noted, “The Internet is becoming an invisible fabric—like air—that enables all the services we’ve come to depend on.” In this schema, mobile devices and their apps are the stitches weaving together these services that help us work, play and live.

Indeed, the rise of mobile technologies has spurred the transformation of industries once considered sleepy into areas where some of the hottest new startups are operating. Uber and Lyft drivers have largely displaced cabbies; Airbnb has won over travelers who had previously booked hotel rooms; Postmates couriers have sped past the bike messengers of yesteryear with their promise of any local product delivered to your door in under one hour.

Looking at the common denominators of these startups gives us some clues about where the next mobility-enabled disruption might occur. First, these companies all offer services characterized by high time-sensitivity. After all, it’s far more likely that someone waiting for a ride they’ve requested will return to a service that supplies a driver in four to five minutes as opposed to ten. By bypassing the dispatching step of traditional cab companies with location-based data capabilities, Uber et al. have cornered that competitive edge.

Second, these companies invest in technology but stay capital light by relying on assets that are already owned by the independent providers they partner with: Cars, bikes, houses and apartments. This low barrier to entry for service providers—no pricey taxi medallion to buy or hotel to maintain— results in the greater supply that drives down costs for consumers and thereby renders these services more desirable.
Finally, these companies are able to use technology to turn what I’ll call “serendipity” into operating efficiencies. Theoretically at least, Lyft drivers or Postmates couriers accept jobs close to where they already are when the job comes up. Jobs are done more quickly, which means that workers make more money in less time and customers are more satisfied.

While a variety of industries have one or more of these features of providing time-sensitive services, possessing the option to rely on shared assets, and capitalizing on serendipity, I believe three more traditional areas especially ripe for mobile-enabled disruption are healthcare, staffing and banking. Watch these spaces if you’re looking for the next company to have its “Uber moment.”

Healthcare
Pioneers in telemedicine are improving access to care for patients who live in underserved areas or who can’t otherwise travel to their doctor’s offices. Startups like American Well and Doctor on Demand offer live video doctor visits via mobile app for a relatively small patient fee, and they’re starting to gain momentum in part by making inroads to employer-sponsored plans. These services might be especially valuable in the arena of mental health, where on-demand offerings are growing and a shortage of face-to-face appointment availability means that patients are often unable to get the timely help they need to avoid crisis.

Staffing
Many of today’s contingent workers find project-based “gigs” and other short-term work using mobile workforce platforms like Upwork, Fiverr and the company I co-founded, Gigwalk. The rise of such platforms has changed the game not just for independent workers, but also for HR departments and staffing agencies, which must now bolster their technological capabilities to stay competitive. The employers of today want to work with staffing partners who can anticipate and meet constantly and rapidly shifting staffing needs. The day when the average staffing agency employee wakes up and glances at an app on her phone to get that day’s work location and assignment is closer than we think.

Banking
Brick-and-mortar and online-only banks alike have been quick to offer mobile apps that let their customers check balances, transfer funds and deposit checks from their phones, but there’s still room for innovation in the key area of cash transfer. While mobile apps like Venmo and Circle let users send or receive cash instantly via text at no charge, we still haven’t seen this capability offered at large scale and integrated with other banking services. The area is ripe for players who can wrap these services together at a low price point.

Just like EBay changed the garage sale to a large-scale virtual goldmine in the ’90s as it used the Internet to match far-flung buyers and sellers, mobile is causing another wave of disruption that will reward a new crop of innovative players. Wherever they emerge from, they promise to further ease the “life on-the-go” that is our 21st century reality.