Verification Quality Comes Into Focus


Across the board, when I talk with people about power management verification or any verification actually, the topic of quality always comes up. The first plan of attack is to look at coverage: how it is managed, how to perform coverage in a more constructed way. Ellie Burns at Mentor Graphics mentioned that because UPF can define all of the states of the system, the states of the power man... » read more

Reducing The Risk Of Third Party IP Integration


It’s old news by now that integration of third party is on the rise. And as part of that, engineering teams are constantly trying to figure out how to reduce the risk of using something they’ve licensed from outside their group or company. There may exist a notion that third party IP is more plug and play than it actually is, and there is an increasing burden on the IP provider to ease the ... » read more

Brain-Inspired Computing


Approaching power/performance tradeoffs from an architectural perspective is essential given the complexities of today’s SoCs. And beyond some traditional techniques that I discussed in a recent article, Bernard Murphy, CTO at Atrenta mentioned that there is currently a lot of buzz about using non-Von Neumann architectures — especially for recognition functions (voice, image and text). ... » read more

Fighting Dark Silicon With Specialized Hardware


Looking at an SoC design from an architecture viewpoint, I’m hearing more discussion lately about the option of offloading tasks to specialized hardware. Especially where dark silicon is concerned, rather than having four or eight ARM processors — all with the same complexity — or cores like graphics processors, if you cannot use them all at full performance and they have to be shut o... » read more

Where Did Auto Innovation Begin?


As far as how the current wave of electronic innovation started happening in the automotive industry, the genesis is likely multi-faceted. During a recent conversation, Cadence Fellow Chris Rowen recalled that there was an underlying recognition that the big opportunity to add value to a vehicle came from electronic systems and a recognition that there was a theoretical capability, for examp... » read more

The LP R&D Ecosystem


I don’t know about you, but I’m always fascinated to learn new things about chip design. New techniques for power reduction, new ways to use existing tools, new tools in general. Some of this is happening at universities, some in happening in industry consortiums or partnerships, and despite what some people say from time to time, there is still innovation happening within the EDA companie... » read more

CES: THE Must-See Auto Show?


Power is such a huge concern for the automotive sector these days, it was not too much of a surprise to hear from Atrenta CTO Bernard Murphy that while at CES, he heard many folks suggesting that the experience that can only be called ‘CES’ may be the new must-see auto show. He observed that car companies are paying attention to surveys showing that a significant percentage of buyers vi... » read more

Power Limits Apps In The IoT


The applications in the IoT are seemingly limitless, but the power is one thing that can’t be. Mary Ann White at Synopsys reminded me that a lot of the energy harvesting devices are super low power and there is a reason why they use just a simple LCD-type display. But we agree it would be so cool if we could have color LCDs that still only consume low power. Of course, I have no doubt tha... » read more

Design For Always-On


Designing for low power is such an interesting area because, while it might be frustrating, one size — or approach, in this case — does not fit all. It is a balancing act to weigh the design objectives against what is possible in the process. NXP, which launched a series of low power MCUs today aimed at the sensor-processing market, has been focusing on optimizing power consumption f... » read more

Balancing Implementation Time, Complexity, Schedule


Design complexity today is demanding all the creativity a design engineer can muster to figure out the best ways to optimize a design for the power situation the device will be operating under. Advanced techniques are being leveraged, to be sure, but in varying degrees, perhaps in part because these techniques impact the complexity of the design implementation. If there are four or five ... » read more

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