The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys rolled out a new version of its software technologies for static and formal verification, which it says increases performance by up to five times. Also new are improved debug and low-power verification with native power simulation, and an integrated IP portfolio. Cadence uncorked a new version of its PCB and packaging environment, which it says speeds up timing closure by as ... » read more

Big Shift In SoC Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss software-driven verification with Ken Knowlson, principal engineer at Intel; Mark Olen, product manager for the Design Verification Technology Division of Mentor Graphics; Steve Chappell, senior manager for CAE technology and verification at Synopsys; Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System Development Suite at Cadenc... » read more

Blog Review: March 5


ARM’s Lori Kate Smith has discovered an unusual electronic billboard advertisement for shampoo on a train platform in Sweden. Watch what happens when the train goes by. Mentor’s J. VanDomelen puts a magnifying glass on the U.S. Defense budget and where the money is going. Times have changed with technology. Who needs soldiers? Cadence’s Brian Fuller interviews Mindtree CTO S. Janaki... » read more

System Bits: March 4


Self-completing programs Since he was a graduate student, Armando Solar-Lezama, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been working on a programming language called Sketch -- which allows programmers to simply omit some of the computational details of their code – and then automatically fills in the gaps. If it’s fleshed out and ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence rolled out a new verification planning and management tool that is based on SQL, which greatly improves functionality and performance and offers multi-user, multi-engine and multi-analysis capabilities. Database technology—in this case, Structured Query Language—remains one of the very few software platforms that can harness multiple processors effectively. Synopsys unveil... » read more

Evolution Vs. Revolution


In the electronic design automation industry changes to tools and flows are nearly always evolutionary. They hide as much change from the user as possible, allowing easier justification from an ROI perspective, and they raise far fewer objections from users, who don’t have to spend time learning how to use new technology or rethink tried and true approaches to problems. Revolution in chip ... » read more

10 Must Knows About Virtual Prototypes


1. What is a virtual prototype? If you ask a room full of people to define ‘system’, you will get as many answers as there are people in the room. The same is true for virtual prototypes. A virtual prototype defines a model of something that is usually created by one group and used by another with some implied abstraction. It is a prototype that exists as a software model on which analysis... » read more

Abstractions: The Good, Bad And Ugly


Raising the level of abstraction has become almost a mantra among chipmakers and tools developers. By moving the vantage point up a couple rungs on the ladder, it’s easier to see how the individual parts of a design go together, to identify problems in the design as well as fixes to problems, and it all can happen much more quickly. That’s the theory, at least. And in most cases, it’s ... » read more

Are Value And Security Needs Misaligned In The IoT?


Today’s keynote given by Green Hills Software CTO David Kleidermacher here at Embedded World in Nuremberg continued on the security thread from last year and was—interestingly enough—titled like a blog post I wrote about the Amphion Forum in late 2012: “Securing the Internet of Things”. Unfortunately, security has not become less scary. In fact, it’s the opposite. David started h... » read more

Clearing Software Roadblocks


Last week I was traveling across North America visiting customers. Besides being amazed at how cold it is in the rest of North America (I live in Silicon Valley where the sun has barely left us during the entire winter), it was good to talk to a wide variety of companies and discuss their software development needs. We encountered three types of companies considering the use of virtual prototyp... » read more

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