Under One Roof


By Ed Sperling Microsoft’s decision to buy Nokia’s phone business, Apple’s move to build its own chips to more effectively run its software, and Google’s effort to develop its own hardware for next-generation platforms such as Google Glass mark an interesting reversal in the electronics industry. Disaggregation was the answer to slow-moving giants such as big-iron companies. Startin... » read more

Equivalence Checking


Everyone is consumed by power these days. The less power our devices use, the better—the longer our batteries will last, the more applications we can use simultaneously, the less HVAC capacity is required by the data center, etc. Clock-gating is one widely used technique to save power in ASIC designs. However, clock gating can significantly impact the structural and behavioral elements of the... » read more

Delicate Balance


By Joe Hupcey III It’s not surprising that power optimization is a critical part of today’s complex designs. Unbeknownst to most consumers is an underlying methodology that every design engineer must follow to make sure a consumer device meets the power requirements of the consumer—even if the consumer doesn’t realize they’re demanding it. The situation in industrial products, suc... » read more

Verifying Security Aspects Of SoC Designs


This paper presents Jasper technology and methodology to verify the robustness of secure data access and the absence of functional paths touching secure areas of a design. Recently, we have seen an increasing demand in industrial hardware design to verify security information. Complex system-on-chips, such as those for cell phones, game consoles, and servers contain secure information. And it i... » read more

How Secure Is Your SoC?


The Russian Federal Guard Service’s decision to revert to typewriters—machines that leave unique mechanical fingerprints—is a good indicator of just how serious security has become in a world dominated by electronics and pervasive connectivity. What’s less apparent is the growing threat at the SoC level—inside complex chips, between the chip and the board, and between chips on the ... » read more

Where Should I Use Formal Functional Verification?


With innovations in formal technologies and methodology, the benefits of formal functional verification apply in many more areas. Although a generic awareness of where formal functional verification applies is useful, understanding the "what" and the "why" leads to greater success. Clearly, if we understand the characteristics of areas with high formal applicability, we can identify not only wh... » read more

Dealing With New Bottlenecks


By Ed Sperling While the number of options for improving efficiency and performance in designs continues to increase, the number of challenges in getting chips at advanced process nodes out the door is increasing, too. Thinner wires, routing congestion, more power domains, IP integration and lithography issues are conspiring to make design much more difficult than in the past. So why aren�... » read more

Drowning In Data


By Ed Sperling The old adage, “Be careful what you wish for,” has hit the SoC design market like a 100-year storm. After years of demanding more data to understand what’s going on in a design, engineering teams now have so much data that they’re drowning in it. This is most obvious at advanced process nodes, of course. But it’s also true these days at more mainstream nodes such as... » read more

The Week In Review: June 7


By Ed Sperling For all the hesitation about moving the Design Automation Conference to Austin, it turns out that Austin has a lot of hardware engineers. In fact they flooded into the conference, turning it into one of the most successful in recent years and setting new records in multiple areas. Even Texas Gov. Rick Perry showed up to see what all the fuss was about. Mentor Graphics added c... » read more

Executive Briefing: Formal Attire


Kathryn Kranen, CEO of Jasper Design Automation, talks with Low Power-High-Performance Engineering about formal verification, where the pain points are in SoC design, and why there is still life left in Moore's Law. [youtube vid=x4jlo6_RRqw] » read more

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