Avoiding A $7.7B Chip Design Cost


For years, the story about semiconductor development cost and about EDA contributions has been pretty simple. Cost has been, is, and will likely be for a while, the single biggest issue in scaling development for more complex designs. The next big leap for verification productivity will be the close integration of verification and design engines, both vertically and horizontally as I have writt... » read more

Historic FinFET/2.5D Firsts


Recently, I had an opportunity to watch the Academy Award nominated movie “Hidden Figures.” If you’re a geek at heart, you need to see this movie. It chronicles the strong contributions of three black women to the NASA space program during the 1960s. The civil rights backstory of the movie is powerful, but there is another aspect of the movie that stayed with me as well: all of the “fir... » read more

Software Driven Test Of FPGA Prototype


Most everyone would agree how important FPGA prototyping is to test and validate an IP, sub-system, or a complete SoC design. Before the design is taped-out it can be validated at speeds near real operating conditions with physical peripherals and devices connected to it instead of simulation models. At the same time, these designs are not purely hardware, but these days incorporate a significa... » read more

54th DAC Program Finalized


A DAC winter meeting held in sunny Mexico isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. (Although we did enjoy the break from this winter storms!) Everybody thinks the Executive Committee members are lounging on the beach enjoying drinks with little umbrellas in them. That couldn’t be further from the truth! In fact, I and 15 other EC members spent most of our February meetings in Puerto Vallar... » read more

Learn From The Experts


I visited SNUG Silicon Valley last week. This annual Synopsys User Group event at the Santa Clara Convention Center is always a good way to get in touch with the end users of various EDA products. I attended the technical track with experts from ARM, NVIDIA, Intel and Synopsys, who talked about their experience in accelerating software development, hardware verification and system validation... » read more

What Is Portable Stimulus?


When [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] first formed the [getentity id="22863" comment="Portable Stimulus Working Group”] and gave it that name, I was highly concerned. I expressed my frustration that the name, while fitting with what most people thought [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"] is about, does not reflect the true nature of the standard being worked on. In short, it is no... » read more

Leveraging The Power Of VDMA Engines For Computer Vision Apps


It's pretty hard to overestimate the role of heterogeneous embedded systems based on Xilinx Zynq-7000 All-Programmable devices in tasks like computer vision. Many consumer electronics and specialized devices are emerging to facilitate and improve industries such as medical, automotive, security, and IoT. The combination of high-performance ARM application processing and Xilinx programmable F... » read more

10 Ways To Skin A Formal Puzzle


During the holidays, OneSpin issued a challenge to solve the classic Einstein’s Riddle using any formal verification tool. Although this puzzle was meant to be a little holiday fun, its solution required thought and some useful formal techniques applicable in everyday functional verification. We received a broad range of answers from engineers across the globe in different companies, inclu... » read more

IoT Edge Design Demands A New Approach


A new breed of designers has arrived that is leveraging the advances in sensing technology to build the intelligent systems at the edge of the IoT. These systems play in every space: on your body, at home, the car or bus that you take to work, and the cities, factories, office buildings, or farms that you work. The energy that you consume and how you travel, by air, land, or sea, all have IoT e... » read more

Ubiquitous AI


We have witnessed an amazing expansion of compute power over the past four years. Go inside the numbers of the recent 100 billion ARM-based chips milestone and you will see that 50 billion were shipped by our partners from 2013 to 2017, which demonstrates the industry’s insatiable demand for more compute. Even more extraordinary is that we expect our partners to ship the next 100 billion ARM-... » read more

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