June 2018 - Page 2 of 13 - Semiconductor Engineering


SoC FPGAs And HW/SW Co-Simulation


Heterogeneous System on Chip (SoC) devices like the Xilinx Zynq 7000 and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC combine a high-performance processing system (PS) with state-of-the-art programmable logic (PL). This combination allows a system to be architected to provide an optimally balanced single-chip software/hardware solution. However, all too often, the integration between the PS and PL takes place late... » read more

FinFET ASICs: It Takes A Platform


Sophisticated, specialized ASIC technology is making an impact on the everyday world around us. Whether it’s a gadget you can have a conversation with, a car that will take over driving from time to time, or internet speeds that seem impossibly fast, there is likely sophisticated custom silicon present as a critical enabling technology. Plenty has been written about advanced ASICs for network... » read more

DAC 2018: System Design, Cloud And Machine Learning


This marks the 10th DAC that I have covered as a blogger. At DAC 2008 in Anaheim, the industry had just come together behind the SystemC TLM 2.0 standard to enable virtual platforms, finally getting to model interoperability. System design is the common thread that is also present in this year’s DAC in 2018 in San Francisco. But a lot has changed. Big data analytics, artificial intelligence a... » read more

Formal Abstraction And Coverage


For the past three years, Oski Technology has facilitated a gathering of formal verification experts over dinner to discuss the problems and issues that they face. They discuss techniques they have been attempting with formal verification technologies, along with the results they have been achieving. Semiconductor Engineering was there to record that conversation and to condense it into the ... » read more

Comprehensive CDC Verification Using Advanced Hierarchical Data Models


In this paper, we describe the hierarchical data model (HDM), which is a performance efficient alternative to the traditional flat CDC verification flow. The HDM is equivalent to an abstract CDC model of the IP that captures the CDC intent of the block along with its integration rules. It is a generic data model that can be seamlessly re-used across releases and across designs wherever the IP i... » read more

Verdi Transaction Debug Platform


Design problems that appear in the late phases of the development cycle can be extremely difficult to track down and debug, thus putting project schedules at risk. It's not uncommon for an engineer to run the verification test on what appears to be the main design problem, only to find the problem in the dump. Traditional debug techniques don't always help to localize the issue. This whitepaper... » read more

Market And Tech Inflections Ahead


Aart de Geus, chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the path to autonomous vehicles, industry dis-aggregation and re-aggregation, security issues, and who's going to pay for chips at advanced nodes. SE: All of a sudden we have a bunch of new markets opening up for electronics. We have assisted and autonomous driving, AI and machine learning, v... » read more

Tuesday At DAC 2018


The morning starts with the Accellera Breakfast. Accellera has made some significant progress this year and we can expect to hear about the approval of the Portable Stimulus 1.0 specification later in the conference as well as the initial release of SystemC CCI as well as a proposal for the creation of an IP Security Assurance Working Group, which will discuss standards development to address s... » read more

Blog Review: June 27


Applied Materials' Sundeep Bajikar argues that to realize the full potential of AI, new computing architectures are necessary, otherwise AI will quickly become unaffordable. Synopsys' Iain Singleton considers why it may not always be necessary to start at the reset state during formal verification and how to use abstractions to get a head start on bug hunting. Cadence's Meera Collier look... » read more

Monday At DAC 2018


DAC #55 started with rumors flying. Will this be the last DAC as we know it? Is there a huge chasm forming between academia and the industry? Will DAC be able to make it in Las Vegas where there is no local interest? Of course, those who have been in the industry know that this kind of speculation happens every few years, and in the 80s, Las Vegas was a very popular location for DAC. There was ... » read more

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