The 2016 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study


I am writing a series of blogs that presents the findings from our new 2016 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study. Similar to my previous 2014 Wilson Research Group functional verification study blogs, I plan to begin this set of blogs with an exclusive focus on FPGA trends. Why? For the following reasons: Some of the more interesting trends in our 2016 study are related to F... » read more

What You Need To Know About Functional Safety Requirements


Driver safety technologies, traffic congestion, environmental concern, and the fundamental premise of how we use our cars are influencing the design of next-generation vehicles. As a sign of the times, Euro NCAP (New Car Assessment Programme) continues to push the vehicle manufacturers by regularly evolving the five star rating to include more and more safety assist features. These include: ... » read more

Managing Power Without Impacting Design Intent


The good news is that there are many techniques available to optimize power in your design. The not-so-good news? Many of these power management techniques also create new complexities in the physical and functional behavior of electronic designs. Fortunately, there’s more good news: implementing a power-aware verification methodology can help you verify power optimization without detracti... » read more

Hitting The Power Integrity Wall At 10nm


At 10nm and beyond, the breakdown of some historic trends tied to Moore's Law is making it harder to fully harvest the benefits of scaling semiconductor technologies. Underlying the power, performance and area benefits of scaling are technological challenges that must be solved in order to make the semiconductor products a profitable business. Power-related challenges are among the most pres... » read more

Implementing ESD Protection In Today’s SoCs


As the semiconductor industry transitions to FinFETs, reliability challenges are increasing. ESD designers are challenged with new issues that would require significant rethinking and redesign of their existing ESD protection strategy. With significant complexity embedded in the silicon, failure analysis and silicon debug is challenging and time consuming even to the ESD experts. Technology ... » read more

MediaTek Grabs Another Gear


Today, it seems to be all the rage for automotive manufacturers to try to continuously one up the competition by announcing a new transmission that has more gears or “speeds." (Popular Mechanics did a nice article about why you would want more gears.) Basically, transmission designers want to keep the engine operating at or near its peak operating efficiency point and extend the operating ran... » read more

How To Achieve Faster Design Convergence And A Better Design


We find ourselves at an interesting point in the evolution of semiconductor technologies electronic systems as a whole. As Moore’s Law continues to charge forward, tools and workflows continue to adapt to major trends, including: Increasing system design complexity; The increasing digital footprint of both design databases and simulation output data, and New architectures/More-than-Mo... » read more

Accuracy Is Relative


I've been doing some thinking on the concept of accuracy lately in my article, Does Power Analysis Need To Be Accurate? And, I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t a single conclusion to be had. Accuracy is very relative to the task at hand, as well as the use case, and the very specific power requirements. And maybe the focus shouldn't be always on the accuracy, but on what the chan... » read more

Back To Basics On Multi-Voltage Verification


It has been more than a decade since the paradigm of voltage-aware Booleans came about and the world of multi-voltage verification took off. We started with 3-5 island SoCs and now stare at 300+ islands on a single SoC. While we have a well-developed standard (IEEE 1801/UPF) for the expression and analysis of voltage variation, it is apt to not forget some of the basics and see how they will ca... » read more

The Role Of Energy-Efficient Circuits In Wearable Healthcare Applications


As beneficial as they are, health monitors for conditions like high blood pressure, arrhythmia, and epilepsy can be uncomfortable and inconvenient due to all of their protruding wires. This opens up an opportunity for designers of wearable healthcare applications. “Wearable electronics are needed for proactive healthcare,” said Dr. Jerald Yoo, an associate professor in the Department of ... » read more

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