A Combined Design And Verification Flow For Safety-Critical Designs


By Tom Anderson and Srikanth Rengarajan I welcome my co-author for today’s post, Srikanth Rengarajan, vice president of product and business development from Austemper Design Systems. We would like to focus on safety-critical designs, a topic very much in the news these days because of the public’s fascination with autonomous vehicles. This consumer category now joins medical electron... » read more

First Look At USB 3.2


I’m super excited to write about and show to you the world’s first USB 3.2 demonstration. Go watch the video first and then read the rest. https://youtu.be/WPUvHeq_Sgs USB 3.2 hardware and software setup We implemented our USB 3.2 Device and Host in the HAPS-80 FPGA-Based hardware prototyping platform. The platforms use USB PHYs, which are implemented in a FinFET process node. ... » read more

Speeding Up High-Frequency Trading


The High-Frequency Trading (HFT) industry has received a lot of attention during the last few years. HFT is all about speed and minimizing latency: the faster you can run trading strategies and algorithms for analyzing minute price changes and executing trade orders, the higher the probability to win over competition. So the competition in this area is very fierce with market players continuous... » read more

Interface DRC Can Streamline Chip-Level Interface Physical Verification


In most design companies, the chip-level physical implementation teams responsible for design floorplanning in place and route (P&R) environments also manage top-level physical verification from the early floorplanning stages through tapeout. In early floorplanning stages, blocks placed in the chip-level floorplan are usually still under development. Merging these incomplete blocks with the... » read more

Neural Nets In ADAS And Autonomous Driving SoC Designs


Automotive electronics has ushered in a new wave of semiconductor design innovation and one new technology gaining a lot of attention is neural networks (NNs). Advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous car designs now rely on NNs to meet the real-time requirements of complex object-recognition algorithms. The concept of NNs has been around since World War II, promising a futu... » read more

Bugs With Long Tails Can Be Costly Pests


I don’t think Van Gogh was considering high performance computing or server architecture, but he made a lot of sense when he said "great things are done by a series of small things brought together." A series of very small things can, and do, create big things: that’s the fundamental premise of long-tail marketing: Amazon, for one has built a strong business from selling millions of niche i... » read more

Inside UVM, Take Three


The reason why UVM came up with such phases is because synchronization among all design-testbench was necessary. Using Verilog and VHDL, verification engineers did not have facilities such as clocking block or run phases. Now, it is very important that the time at which test vectors applied from test-bench reaches the Design Under Test(DUT) at the same time. If timing for different signals vari... » read more

Why Your FPGA Synthesis Flow Requires Verification


When you think about it, logic synthesis is a vital but rather intimidating part of modern chip design. This process takes a high-level description of intended functionality, written in an RTL language that looks more like software than hardware, and implements it using the low-level building-block library of an ASIC or FPGA device. The resulting gate-level netlist must meet a variety of requir... » read more

Deep Learning And The Future


Following up from my last post on our deep learning event at the Computer History Museum – “ASICs Unlock Deep Learning Innovation,” I’d like to take a glimpse into the future. Like many such discussions, it’s often useful to take a look back first to try and make sense out of what is to come.  That’s essentlially what our keynote speaker, Ty Garibay, did at the event. Ty is the CTO... » read more

Design Flows At 5nm And Beyond


It’s probably the first time that you’ll ever hear an old (well, old-ish!) person say this, but things were easier back in my day. 40 nanometers was the most advanced node that I ever designed SoCs at and, although it wasn’t easy back then, it pales against the myriad of challenges facing designers today. Back then, compartmentalization of function and roles was relatively easy. We do ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →