FPGA And System Designs Get To Market Faster Leveraging ASIC-Proven Analysis Tools


Increasing power constraints have resulted in finer-grained partitioning of designs into functional domains that can have clocks disabled or, more drastically, are powered down entirely. Systems are required to adaptively manage clocks to minimize switching power. Performance and area constraints have led to the abandonment of more conservative practices in favor of more aggressive designs; ... » read more

Shift-Left Low Power Verification With UPF Information Model


By Himanshu Bhatt, Shreedhar Ramachandra and Narayanan Ganesan Low power testbenches today have no visibility of the UPF objects and their states during a low power simulation. This has been one of the factors limiting the users from writing re-usable low power testbenches that can monitor the UPF objects and react to the state changes of UPF objects. To meet this requirement for the user to... » read more

How To Integrate An Embedded FPGA


Choosing to add programmable logic into an SoC with an eFPGA is just the beginning. Other choices follow involving how many lookup tables (LUTs), how much routing and what topology, how will data be transferred in and out of the fabric, does data need to be coherent with system memory, how will it be programmed and tested, and what RTL functions need to be embedded into the programmable fabric ... » read more

Intellectual Property: Trust… But Verify


For those around the microelectronic component industry for many years, we have seen quite a transformation of capability, sourcing of the supply chain, and now threats to these devices that drive the technology in our world today. These integrated circuits (ICs), once so simple as a few transistors, have continued to follow Moore’s Law and are now made up of tens of billions of transistor... » read more

Why IP Quality Is So Difficult To Determine


Differentiating good IP from mediocre or bad IP is getting more difficult, in part because it depends up on how and where it is used and in part because even the best IP may work better in one system than another—even in chips developed by the same vendor. This has been one of the challenges with IP over the years. In many cases, IP is poorly characterized, regardless of whether that IP wa... » read more

Delivering High-Speed Communications: The Back Story


Back in January, I posted a blog about what it takes to deliver high-speed communication. In that post, I talked about a new test board for our high-speed 7nm 56G PAM4 & NRZ DSP-based long-reach SerDes. We collaborated with several companies to build a high-precision board that could be used to test our SerDes in a system context. At that time, we were just finishing the opening act for thi... » read more

Adding Order And Structure To Verification


You can't improve what you can't measure, and when it comes to methodologies the notion of measurement becomes more difficult. Add in notions of the skills, capabilities and experience levels of individuals within an organization, which may affect their ability to adopt certain technologies, and it requires considerable attention. This is where concepts such as capability maturity models (CM... » read more

Analog Fault Simulation


Anand Thiruvengadam, senior staff product marketing manager at Synopsys, drills down into the need for fault simulation in analog circuits in automotive designs. » read more

SLAM And DSP Implementation


With the introduction of simultaneous localization and mapping technology, or SLAM, there comes a need for more sophisticated DSPs to handle the required computations. To address this need, Cadence has introduced the Tensilica Vision Q7 DSP to handle the requirements of SLAM, including high performance, low power, and with an ease of development that engineers can leverage to design new and exc... » read more

Speeding 5G Network Infrastructure Design


As the world becomes more connected and digital, the need for more data and higher speed is evident. The increase in global internet traffic, along with decentralization of cloud and data centers, has driven wired and wireless networks to support 5G network infrastructures. 5G technology promises to enable 1,000 times more traffic, 10 times faster speed and a 10 times increase in throughput. Th... » read more

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