Manage Your Risk In RISC-V


Adoption of RISC-V processors is accelerating. This technology, like everything, comes with benefits and risks. The open standard means freedom for many developers, but success depends on the development of a support ecosystem around RISC-V. Industry collaboration is making broad adoption of RISC-V possible, and one example is the introduction of efficient trace for RISC-V cores. When incorp... » read more

Being A Design Verification Engineer Is Fun And Rewarding


Philippe Luc, director of verification at Codasip, talked to students of the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) about what it is like to be a verification engineer. On one hand the UKESF encourages young people to study electronics and pursue careers in this sector, and on the other hand Codasip is very keen to help prepare the engineers who will solve tomorrow’s technology chall... » read more

How To Improve Yield Ramp For New Designs And Technology Nodes


The complicated silicon defect types and defect distribution of new IC manufacturing technologies can result in very low yield for new designs and technology nodes. During technology qualification using test chips, scan chain failures account for most of the chip failures. Diagnosing those scan chain defects is a powerful way to uncover new and systematic defects. The chip maker’s goal is ... » read more

Glitched On Earth By Humans


The Black Hat conference always brings up interesting and current research within the device security industry. Lennert Wouters of COSIC studied the security of the Starlink User Terminal. After some PCB-level reverse engineering, he found a serial port and observed various boot loaders, U-boot, and Linux running on the device. However, there was no obvious way to gain further access. The... » read more

5 Good Things About RISC-V


RISC-V has been around for some time now, and if you are here it’s because you have heard of it. But perhaps you still need to be convinced that it is the future? If you still wonder about its potential and benefits, here are five good things about RISC-V. 1. RISC-V is an open standard Let’s start simple. This is nothing new, but let’s be clear on what open standard means. Open stan... » read more

Data Security Takes Front Seat In Industrial IoT Design


As recently as 10 years ago, protecting Internet of Things (IoT) data was largely an afterthought. Engineers designing IoT and industrial IoT (IIoT) networks were more concerned with ensuring their applications functioned according to design specifications, not with the unintended consequences of releasing potentially sensitive information into the cloud. Today, with billions of sensors an... » read more

AI ASICs Will Become Increasingly Application-Specific


Back in 2017, I blogged about AI ASICs being not exactly ASICs. One of the primary reasons for not calling AI acceleration chips ASIC is because historically ASIC or Application Specific Integrated Circuit has referred to a fixed hardware block with limited programmability. AI ASICs on the other hand offer significant programming via frameworks such as Tensorflow and the point was that they are... » read more

DRM Security Trends And Future


Digital rights management (DRM) is known to protect and encrypt content in order to deliver it to the device. DRM’s main purpose is to close the gaps in content protection strategies and enable content consumption on different devices to be easily accessible. As DRM technologies have matured, it is expected that their security capabilities will follow. The security measures implemented on ... » read more

Extending The Benefits Of UVM To Include AMS: An Update On Accellera’s UVM-AMS Standard Development


By Tom Fitzpatrick and Peter Grove SoC teams can be divided up into design and verification groups. For digital designs, the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), initially developed by Accellera and now standardized as IEEE 1800.2, has been the industry standard for the past decade. Since most SoC designs also have analog and mixed-signal IP blocks, it would be ideal for verification en... » read more

Collaboration Leading The Way For Broad RISC-V Adoption


We recently announced a partnership with Intel as part of the launch of the Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V, making leading RISC-V technology more accessible for prototyping, production design or research purposes using Intel FPGAs. Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V allows for a variety of RISC-V cores and other IP to be instantiated on FPGA platforms, with the ability to run industry-leading oper... » read more

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