Abstract Verification


Verification relies on a separation of concerns. Otherwise the task has no end. Sometimes we do it without thinking, but as an industry, we have never managed to fully define it such that it can become an accepted and trusted methodology. This becomes particularly true when we bring abstraction into the picture. A virtual prototype is meant to be true to behavior, but there could be timing d... » read more

Does System Design Still Need Abstraction?


About 15 years ago, the assumption in the EDA industry was that system design would be inevitable. The transition from gate-level design to a new entry point at the register transfer level (RTL) seemed complete with logic synthesis becoming well-adopted. The next step seemed to be so obvious at the time: High-level synthesis (HLS) and transaction-based development beyond RTL—also taking into ... » read more

5G Needs Cohesive Pre- And Post-Silicon Verification


While 5G doesn’t start from a clean slate, it does make significant changes to the 4G architecture. These changes mean that the ecosystem from chips to operators is evolving, giving opportunities to more companies to engage in this growing market. Realignment in fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul In particular, the radio access network (RAN) has been redefined as Cloud RAN (sometimes called ... » read more

Utilizing Computational Memory


For systems to become faster and consume less power, they must stop wasting the power required to move data around and start adding processing near memory. This approach has been proven, and products are entering the marketplace designed to fill a number of roles. Processing near memory, also known as computational memory, has been hiding in the shadows for more than a decade. Ever since the... » read more

Functional Safety Implementation Goes Mainstream


Electronics engineers are being thrust into the automotive market like never before. The move to electrify automobiles, along with the advent of self-driving cars, means that silicon designers will be designing ever more sophisticated automotive ICs. But cars aren’t like most other electronic systems; it’s imperative that they cause no harm should they fail. This brings us to the realm o... » read more

HW/SW Co-Verification For Hybrid Systems


Heterogeneous SoC architectures such as Zynq have become very popular recently due to the combination of programmable logic (FPGA) and processing system (ARM) integrated into a single chip. Developing a design using such hybrid systems causes complexity in design verification stages. To help address this complexity, Aldec introduced support for QEMU for co-verification in our HES.Proto-AXI host... » read more

IP Management And Development At 5/3nm


The growing complexity of moving to new process nodes is making it much more difficult to create, manage and re-use IP. There are more rules, more data to manage, and more potential interactions as density increases, both in planar implementations and in advanced packaging. And the problems only get worse as designs move to 5nm and 3nm, and as more heterogeneous components such as accelerato... » read more

RISC-V Challenges And Opportunities


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss open instruction set hardware and the future of RISC-V with Ben Levine, senior director of product management in Rambus' Security Division; Jerry Ardizzone, vice president of worldwide sales at Codasip; Megan Wachs, vice president of engineering at SiFive; and Rishiyur Nikhil, CTO of Bluespec. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. (L-... » read more

Using HLS To Improve Algorithms


Can an HLS optimization tool outperform expert-level hand-optimizations? A recently published white paper examines how SLX FPGA is used to optimize a secure hash algorithm. T the results are compared to a competition-winning hand-optimized HLS implementation of the same algorithm. This approach provides a nearly 400x speed-up over the unoptimized implementation and even outperforms the hand ... » read more

5G Verification Is Impossible Without Emulation


Emulation, combined with a rich assortment of virtualized versions of the many protocols that 5G will require, is the only practical way of ensuring that the first round of silicon built will be the production version, able to handle all of the functions and configurations that it might be faced with and having the tight performance characteristics needed for successful integration into a 5G sy... » read more

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