Abstraction Aging


During the course of doing interviews for my article on system simulation and abstraction, I spoke to several people who, just like myself, had started their career pushing abstraction. At the time, we were all frustrated that the industry didn't move fast enough. The advantages of abstraction appeared to be so clear. Everyone developed slides showing that the cost to fix bugs increased the fur... » read more

Wednesday At DAC 2018


Wednesday starts with a visionary talk followed by a keynote. The Visionary talk was given by Chidi Chidambaram, VP of engineering for Qualcomm, and looked at 'Challenges to Enable 5G System Scaling.' "We have to start taking a system view rather than just following technology and at the same time we have to get concerned about durability," he said. "Mobile will continue to be the leader becaus... » read more

Tuesday At DAC 2018


The morning starts with the Accellera Breakfast. Accellera has made some significant progress this year and we can expect to hear about the approval of the Portable Stimulus 1.0 specification later in the conference as well as the initial release of SystemC CCI as well as a proposal for the creation of an IP Security Assurance Working Group, which will discuss standards development to address s... » read more

Monday At DAC 2018


DAC #55 started with rumors flying. Will this be the last DAC as we know it? Is there a huge chasm forming between academia and the industry? Will DAC be able to make it in Las Vegas where there is no local interest? Of course, those who have been in the industry know that this kind of speculation happens every few years, and in the 80s, Las Vegas was a very popular location for DAC. There was ... » read more

Commoditizing Constraints


Preparing articles for Semiconductor Engineering involves talking to a lot of people and then trying to fit their statements together in a way that is logical and fair. Sometimes a subject will come up in one of these calls that is not really on topic, but is still interesting. One such incident happened this week while doing research for the Verification 3.0 article. The topic was constrain... » read more

Re-Engineering Humanity


The technology industry is comfortable with trends that increase linearly for decades—and many that follow quadratic curves, also seemingly forever. Moore's Law and the rate of adoption of new technologies are two examples that come to mind. Those same trends can be used to scare or even create panic amongst a less informed general public. Such is the case with Artificial Intelligence (AI)... » read more

Verification And Validation Brothers


At DVCon this year, Doug Amos took the stage for the [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"] sponsored lunch presentation. For those of you who were there but decided to skip the lunch, expecting the traditional forced sales pitch, you made a mistake. Amos is one of those rare people who know how to inject humor, teaching and marketing into a single presentation such that the... » read more

Why EDA Needs To Change


Why is it taking so long for [getkc id="305" kc_name="machine learning"] to have an impact within EDA? Most of the time when I talk to the experts within the field I hear about why designs are so different from other machine learning applications, and I know that is true. Many of you reading this may not be aware that I was a developer of EDA tools for more than 35 years before I ended up writi... » read more

DVCon Committee Picks


A typical development team contains more verification engineers than design engineers, and that skew is getting wider. You can expect the trend to increase given that verification teams are now getting loaded with added complexity from heterogeneous multi-core systems, functional safety, neural networks and security-in addition to increasing size. Companies that do not keep up with the lates... » read more

And The Winner Is…


Finding out what resonates with our readers is important, so each year I look back through the list of the best-read articles for the channels that I write for. While this simple strategy does favor articles published during the early part of the year, the fact that our readership continues to grow, partially offsets this bias. For example, in Low Power/High Performance (LPHP) a quarter of the ... » read more

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