AI Chips Driving Need For New Test Implementation Methodologies


Artificial intelligence has never been more in the news than it is today.  From picking stock market investments to autonomous driving, we have heard about what AI can do when it works and what happens when it goes awry. The consequences are huge if AI doesn’t work which puts a lot of pressure on hardware engineers to ensure that their chips can be extensively tested for proper and safe func... » read more

Verdi Transaction Debug Platform: A Simplified Way To Debug IIP Designs And SoC


Authors: Abhishek Upadhyay, R&D Engineer, Synopsys, and Kanak Rajput, Application Engineer, Synopsys Design problems that appear in the late phases of the development cycle can be extremely difficult to track down and debug, thus putting project schedules at risk. It’s not uncommon for an engineer to run the verification test on what appears to be the main design problem, only to find the ... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 18


Lam Research's David Haynes finds that taking advances made at 300mm and applying them via upgrades to 200mm equipment is a cost appropriate strategy to quickly improve yield and add capacity. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks at which of this year's many data breaches hit corporate wallets the hardest and how the cost of privacy noncompliance is expected to rise with California's CCPA and st... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Rambus finalized its acquisition of the silicon IP, secure protocols and provisioning business from Verimatrix, formerly Inside Secure, for $45 million at closing, and up to an additional $20 million, subject to certain revenue targets in 2020. RISC-V SiFive unveiled two new product families. The SiFive Apex processor cores target mission-critical processors with Size, Weight, and Power (SW... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security and Automotive


Internet of Things Western Digital Corp. and Codasip are working together on Western Digital’s SweRV Core EH1, which is a RISC-V core with a 32-bit, dual superscalar, 9-stage pipeline architecture. The core, launched earlier this is aimed at embedded devices supporting data-intensive edge applications, such as storage controllers, industrial IoT, real-time analytics in surveillance systems, ... » read more

Verifying Security In Processor-based SoCs


By Ruud Derwig and Nicole Fern Security in modern systems is of utmost importance. Device manufacturers are including multiple security features and attack protections into both the hardware and software design. For example, the Synopsys DesignWare ARC Processor IP includes many security functions in its SecureShield feature set. End-product system security, however, cannot be guaranteed by ... » read more

A New Dawn For IP


The IP industry is changing again. The concept started as build once, use everywhere, but today it is more like architect once, customize everywhere. Few designs can afford sub-optimal IP for their application. The need for customized IP is driven by both leading-edge designs and the trailing markets, although for different reasons. While this customization is causing IP companies to transfo... » read more

Defining And Improving AI Performance


Many companies are developing AI chips, both for training and for inference. Although getting the required functionality is important, many solutions will be judged by their performance characteristics. Performance can be measured in different ways, such as number of inferences per second or per watt. These figures are dependent on a lot of factors, not just the hardware architecture. The optim... » read more

A UFS Verification Closure Flow Using The Synopsys Verification Continuum Platform


It's a longstanding cliche, but it is true that “there is no silver bullet for functional verification.” No single tool or methodology can find and shoot down all the bugs in a large, complex semiconductor design. Simulation is well understood but can be slow for today's large SoCs. Emulation hardware is fast, but expensive enough that it is usually shared across a verification team. Formal... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 11


Arm's Urmish Thakker investigates ways to make recurrent neural networks run on resource constrained devices with limited cache and compute resources by reducing the number of RNN computations, without the need to retrain the original RNN model. Mentor's Brent Klingforth digs into the challenges of designing rigid-flex PCBs and how advanced capabilities in modern tools, like awareness of sta... » read more

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