Author's Latest Posts


Toward Real-World Power Analysis


The expansion of emulation into new fields, rather than just functional verification, is making it possible to do power analysis over longer spans of time. The result is a fast and effective way to analyze real-world scenarios. This is a new field, and it marks a new use of this technology. While it is still evolving, several ideas have surfaced about the best methodology and the best way to... » read more

Gaps In The Verification Flow


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of the functional verification flow with Stephen Bailey, director of emerging companies at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; [getperson id="11079" comment="Anupam Bakshi"], CEO of [getentity id="22168" e_name="Agnisys"]; [getperson id="11124" comment="Mike Bartley"], CEO of [getentity id="22868" e_name="Test and Verification... » read more

The Battle To Embed The FPGA


There have been many attempts to embed an [gettech id="31071" comment="FPGA"] into chips in the past, but the market has failed to materialize—or the solutions have failed to inspire. An early example was [getentity id="22924" comment="Triscend"], founded in 1997 and acquired by [getentity id="22839" e_name="Xilinx"] in 2004. It integrated a CPU—which varied from an [getentity id="22186" co... » read more

Embedded FPGAs Going Mainstream?


Systems on chip have been made with many processing variants ranging from general-purpose CPUs to DSPs, GPUs, and custom processors that are highly optimized for certain tasks. When none of these options provide the necessary performance or consumes too much power, custom hardware takes over. But there is one type of processing element that has rarely been used in a major SoC— the [gettech id... » read more

Emulation’s Footprint Grows


It wasn't that many years ago that [getkc id="30" comment="emulation"] was an expensive tool available to only a few, but it has since become indispensable for a growing number of companies. One obvious reason is the growing size of designs and the inability of [getkc id="11" kc_name="simulation"] to keep up. But emulation also has been going through a number of transformations that have made i... » read more

Gaps In The Verification Flow


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of the functional verification flow with Stephen Bailey, director of emerging companies at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; [getperson id="11079" comment="Anupam Bakshi"], CEO of [getentity id="22168" e_name="Agnisys"]; [getperson id="11124" comment="Mike Bartley"], CEO of [getentity id="22868" e_name="Test and Verification... » read more

Side-Channel Attacks Make Devices Vulnerable


As the world begins to take security more seriously, it becomes evident that a device is only as secure as its weakest component. No device can be made secure by protecting against a single kind of attack. Hypervisors add a layer of separation between tasks making sure that one task cannot steal secrets from another. Protection of the JTAG port is necessary to prevent access underneath the h... » read more

Power Limits Of EDA


Power has become a major gating factor in semiconductor design. It is now the third factor in design optimization, along with performance, and is almost becoming more important than area. But there are limits to the amount of help that [getkc id="7" kc_name="EDA"] can provide with [getkc id="106" kc_name="power optimization"]. Power is not just an optimization problem. It is a design problem... » read more

The Real Differences Between HW And SW


How many times have we heard people say that hardware and software do not speak the same language? The two often have different terms for essentially the same thing. What hardware calls constrained random test is what software people call fuzzing. Another one recently caught my eye in a conversation with Jama Software, a Portland software company that has made a name for itself in requiremen... » read more

Hypervisors: Help Or Hindrance?


Hypervisors are seeing an increased level of adoption, but do they help or hinder the development and verification process? The answer may depend on your perspective. In the hardware world, system-level integration is rapidly becoming a roadblock in the development process. While each of the pieces may be known to work separately, as soon as they are put together, the interactions between th... » read more

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