Raising The IP Abstraction Level


By Ed Sperling An increasing reliance on commercial and re-used IP and more emphasis placed on software development is adding even more pressure onto semiconductor design teams to figure out the benefits and limitations of myriad possible choices earlier in the design process. Design teams already are under pressure to meet increasingly tighter market deadlines, and it is stressing every pa... » read more

Faster IP Integration


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down with Laurent Moll, chief technology officer at Arteris, to talk about interoperability, complexity and integration issues. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: What’s the big challenge with IP? Moll: Interoperability is always a concern. Because of ARM’s dominance, a lot of people are moving to AMBA protocols, whether that’... » read more

New Reliability Issues Emerge


By Ed Sperling Most consumers define reliability by whether a device turns on and works as planned, but the term is becoming harder to define as complexity increases and systems are interconnected. Adding more functionality in less space has made it more difficult to build complex chips, and it has made it more difficult to prevent problems in those chips. Verification coverage is a persist... » read more

The Ubiquitous GPU


By Ann Steffora Mutschler No matter the application area, GPUs are likely playing a role like never before—even to accelerate EDA software algorithms. It’s no wonder given the ability of GPUs to handle parallel processing much more effectively than CPUs. And when coexisting in a heterogeneous system, GPUs allow the design team to maximize efficiency and performance by allocating tasks... » read more

The New Verification Landscape


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Verification technologies and tools have never been more sophisticated. But putting together a methodology is more than just putting tools together. It starts with trying to get a handle on the complexity, knowing what to test, how to test and when. “UVM was standardized and people have been working to adopt that which has been generally a positive,” said Steve Ba... » read more

Memory Gets Smarter


By Ed Sperling Look inside any complex SoC these days and the wiring congestion around memory is almost astounding. While the number of features on a chip is increasing, they are all built around the same memory modules. Logic needs memory, and in a densely packed semiconductor, the wires that connect the myriad logic blocks are literally all over the memory. This is made worse by the fact ... » read more

De-Mystifying The SoC Supply Chain


By Barbara Jorgensen At the heart of every supply chain operation is the desire to mitigate risk. In theory, a supply chain allows a customer to leverage the best of the best in technology, logistics or production at a lower cost than DIY (do it yourself.) The system on chip (SoC) supply chain is no different—there’s a whole ecosystem in the semiconductor industry that supports design, pro... » read more

Formal Verification Comes Of Age


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Formal verification technology, also known as formal property checking, has been in existence since the early 1990s. Still, it’s only in the past five years that it has made big strides in the last five years in terms of the capacity of the technology to handle bigger pieces of a design, leveraging advancements in computing as well as improvements to the algor... » read more

The X Factor


By Ed Sperling The number of unknowns is growing in every segment of SoC design all the way through manufacturing, raising the stakes between reliability and the tradeoffs necessary to meet market windows. Tools are available to deal with some of these unknowns, or X’s, but certainly not all of them. Moreover, no single tool can handle all unknowns, some of which can build upon other unkn... » read more

The Growing Need For Behavioral Modeling


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to behavioral or functional modeling, there is an inherent notion of function, architecture and interconnect. This approach has long been considered a future requirement, but in complex designs the future part no longer applies. Behavioral modeling is a way of isolating or abstracting out a key part of the architectural description and making sure i... » read more

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