What “Hamilton – An American Musical” Tickets And Emulation Have In Common


During a recent trip to New York, I managed to see “Hamilton, An American Musical”—despite the running joke about how hard it is to get tickets. The sale of “Hamilton” tickets teaches an interesting lesson about what I would call an “automatic feedback loop of value adjustment”. And believe it or not, it bears some resemblance to how verification users actually choose what engine ... » read more

“Eating Your Own Dog Food” When Developing An Emulator


It’s a great week for emulation week with ARM TechCon happening in Silicon Valley. Palladium Z1 is a finalist for Best Product in the categories “Best Chip” and “Best System” and we started the week with an announcement that Fujitsu adopted the Cadence Palladium Z1 Enterprise Emulation Platform for their ARMv8-based “Post-K Supercomputer Development.” Cadence has faced some of the... » read more

TSMC OIP, Vertical Integration And The Power of Ecosystems


After several attempts I’ve made it – my presentation at the TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum was accepted this year. You may ask, what does a front-end guy like me do at a technology implementation forum like TSMC OIP? And why is he excited about it? The short answer is that it brings back my past. I am excited about how the front-end flows and implementation flows get connected in a closer way. I... » read more

How the Internet of Things Drives More Diverse Design Considerations


Last week I was in Taiwan, presenting at and attending CDNLive. It is always great to see the local progress. MediaTek presented on their adoption of Perspec System Verifier, highlighting how they increased throughput of test generation from 1 to 100 test cases per hour. Realtek reported on their use of JasperGold technology, as well as on their Palladium adoption, achieving between 30x to 50x ... » read more

Models Are Dead? Long Live Models


During the first half of this year I had more discussions with customers on models again. Are models back? For what purpose? In short, it looks like models are well adopted and in use for software development. For performance and architecture analysis, however, as a recent presentation from Renesas at CDNLive Japan shows, users just use RTL as that accuracy is required. In combination with emul... » read more

Balancing Emulation And FPGA-Based Prototyping For Software Development


This year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC) has just finished and confirmed some of the trends I discussed in my last blog, “The Top Five Trends in Verification to Watch For at DAC 2016”, specifically when it comes to the set of connected engines, or “COVE” as Jim Hogan dubbed it. The Cadence Theater at DAC is always a good opportunity to listen to hands-on customer experiences, an... » read more

The Top Five Trends in Verification to Watch for at DAC 2016


The Design Automation Conference in Austin is upon us, so it's time for my annual preview of what to look for. In my mind, five trends stand out and are clearly visible in the DAC program as well as in what we are presenting at our booth: Stronger ties between verification engines Software-driven verification with portable stimulus Metric-driven verification Application specificity ... » read more

Stories From The Village Called Hardware-Assisted Development


They say it takes a village to raise children and, as a dad of an 11-year-old girl, I can relate. Similarly, for system development and hardware-assisted verification, the overall ecosystem of users, use models, and partners is equally important. The recent CDNLive Silicon Valley event is a great example. The SoC and Hardware/Software track that my team and I were hosting featured NVIDIA, Netro... » read more

How Do Design And Verification Change In The IoT Age?


Where is the Internet of Things (IoT) on the hype curve? Are expectations too high, or is it really the next big thing? My recent trip to the Design Automation and Test Conference (DATE) in Dresden, Germany, did not give all the answers, but it definitely did shed some light for me on this topic. A very enthusiastic taxi driver took me back 25 years to the Nov. 9, 1989, the time when the Ber... » read more

Education And Communication


With the System Development Suite introduced back in 2011, it is worthwhile to review how the adoption of the connected verification engines has progressed. It turns out that only part of the issues to be solved are purely technical. Communication across different technology areas is key, and with that, education of a new breed of engineer may become a key issue going forward. As a son of a ... » read more

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