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

UVM Register Layer: The Structure


I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to the day where we won’t even have to go to the doctor’s office for an exam. Instead, we will all have scanners in our homes that will transmit full digital models to our doctors who can then poke, prod, and examine us remotely. This is essentially what the UVM register layer allows and does. The UVM register layer acts similarly by mod... » read more

Earthquake Proof Your Software Development


In this blog we tend to focus on the benefits and opportunities that arise when using virtual prototyping. However, in real life we well know that any situation bears not only opportunities but also risks. I was reminded of this by the recent earthquake disaster in Kumamoto Japan. Having lived in the most earthquake prone areas in the world for the past 10 years, I know firsthand how easy it is... » read more

Deep Space Design Considerations


The linchpin technology in a deep space telescope is the ability to efficiently convert analog image sensor data into digital data in order to beam home high-resolution images of astronomical objects. The analog-to-digital converters (ADC) must perform flawlessly once deployed, because it is not feasible to drive out 1 million miles into space to fix any problems. The next-generation success... » read more

Better Heterogeneous CPU Designs


The trend toward heterogeneous CPU designs is growing. Case in point: The NXP i.MX7 family of devices have such a design. In this blog, I will discuss the (simple) steps necessary to get the most out of i.MX7 using the ARM Development Studio, more commonly known as DS-5, but the information applies to most similar systems. Compiling code depends greatly on the use case. Within DS-5, there... » read more

On The Verge


Anyone who has been following the IoT/IoE or whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement knows we’re on the eve of far-reaching, life-altering change. There will be billions of connected devices, all streaming information to gigascale cloud datacenters using big data analytics and deep machine learning. Somewhere along the way, we’ll discover important, useful information from all this tha... » read more

How Long Until You Can Take A Self-Driving Car To DAC?


There is no hotter topic in tech than self-driving cars. How else to explain the worldwide headlines after what can only be described as a modest little fender-bender last month in Mountain View. The culprit was one of Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous Lexus 450h's, by now a media darling/goat. Despite the apparent and very prosaic facts — the Lexus was traveling 2 miles per hour, nobody was hurt,... » read more

RTL Done And Other Bogus Development Milestones


My definition of progress has changed over the years. I don’t think about it much anymore but it was obvious in a talk I gave a few weeks ago to a diverse group of hardware developers. Part of that talk centered around how we define progress in design and verification. This is a normal thing for me; I was speaking to slides I’d used several times before and the message was no different than... » read more

It’s Transition Time


For the past couple of years we've been hearing about the coming onslaught of the IoT, difficulties in scaling device features and a shift left that will redefine verification, debug and software prototyping. It's all happening. Taken individually, these are noteworthy changes. Taken as a whole, they represent a massive repositioning of the semiconductor industry, from architectural explorat... » read more

Everything You Wanted to Know About Formal, But Were Too Afraid to Ask


Formal Verification is one of those EDA technologies that's been used in mainstream development in one or two applications for many years. The true power of the approach only now has started to capture the attention of engineers. Although there are a few reasons for this, perhaps the most significant is formal’s ill-gotten reputation as a mysterious beast too difficult to tame. After worki... » read more

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