Abstraction Aging


During the course of doing interviews for my article on system simulation and abstraction, I spoke to several people who, just like myself, had started their career pushing abstraction. At the time, we were all frustrated that the industry didn't move fast enough. The advantages of abstraction appeared to be so clear. Everyone developed slides showing that the cost to fix bugs increased the fur... » read more

Tech Talk: FPGA RTL Checking


Tobias Welp, software architect and engineering manager at OneSpin Solutions, explains how to ensure the RTL created by design engineers matches what shows up in an FPGA. https://youtu.be/0N1PDYyq0dY » read more

Synopsys’ Vision For The New Wave Of Chip Design


Learn how the recent semiconductor industry shifts are breaking the traditional RTL-to-GDSII flow, and how the new Synopsys Fusion Technology helps you cross the chasm. To read more, click here. » read more

Achieving RTL-To-Netlist Equivalence


Running quality tests and regression at RTL level, and even fixing all discovered design bugs does not guarantee the flawless hardware design. To make sure there are no bugs in the target hardware, there is a need to ensure flawless transformation of RTL code to the technology-dependent netlist. This in turns sets the requirements for the “design-for-implementation” coding, where designers ... » read more

Accounting For Power Earlier


Concerns about power usage in an SoC are far from new, but the adoption of power management techniques still varies by company and by project. Leading semiconductor providers have made the necessary changes in tooling and methodology to account for [getkc id="106" kc_name="power awareness"] because they have to, but the rest of the industry hasn't necessarily caught up. “The companies t... » read more

Supporting CPUs Plus FPGAs


While it has been possible to pair a CPU and FPGA for quite some time, two things have changed recently. First, the industry has reduced the latency of the connection between them and second, we now appear to have the killer app for this combination. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these changes and the state of the tool chain to support this combination, with Kent Orthner, system... » read more

What Is Portable Stimulus?


When [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] first formed the [getentity id="22863" comment="Portable Stimulus Working Group”] and gave it that name, I was highly concerned. I expressed my frustration that the name, while fitting with what most people thought [getkc id="10" kc_name="verification"] is about, does not reflect the true nature of the standard being worked on. In short, it is no... » read more

IP Qualification During RTL Synthesis


By Sudhakar Jilla and Arvind Narayanan The use of IP (intellectual property) as basic building blocks is an established practice for SoC designs. Most IP is developed without chip-level context and very little knowledge about physical design, which can introduce unwanted schedule risk into the design process. Much of the risk of IP development can be mitigated by using new physical synthesis... » read more

Overcoming The Limits Of Scaling


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the increasing reliance on architectural choices for improvements in power, performance and area, with [getperson id="11425" comment=" Sundari Mitra"], CEO of [getentity id="22535" comment="NetSpeed Systems"]; Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of [getentity id="22674" e_name="Arteris"]; [getperson id="11032" comment="Simon Davidmann"] CEO of [getentit... » read more

An Easier Path To Faster C With FPGAs


For most scientists, what is inside a high-performance computing platform is a mystery. All they usually want to know is that a platform will run an advanced algorithm thrown at it. What happens when a subject matter expert creates a powerful model for an algorithm that in turn automatically generates C code that runs too slowly? FPGA experts have created an answer. More and more, the genera... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →