The Week In Review: IoT


Taiwan’s annual Computex trade show, celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, opened this week, and the Internet of Things is among the focus areas of the exhibition. Tsai Ing-wen, the new president of Taiwan, said at the opening ceremony, “The IoT era is coming strong. Taiwan must focus on the integration of hardware and software along with low-volume, high-variety manufacturing capabil... » read more

Cooperation Instead Of Competition


I spent more than 20 years working in EDA and managed to do so without ever working for one of the big three. Big EDA companies were always the competition. Oh sure, you’d partner with them strategically if you could, but always keeping in mind that little fish swimming with big fish often end up being eaten. That all changed seven months ago when ARM acquired Carbon’s technology and tea... » read more

Open Standards For Verification?


The increasing use of verification data for analyzing and testing complex designs is raising the stakes for more standardized or interoperable database formats. While interoperability between databases in chip design is not a new idea, it has a renewed sense of urgency. It takes more time and money to verify increasingly complex chips, and more of that data needs to be used earlier in the fl... » read more

Going Open Source


Open Source often is thought of as an alternative to commercial software licensed using fairly typical business models. For example, variants of open source Linux supplied by companies such as Red Hat charge a subscription for support and maintenance. Maybe there is an opportunity to leverage Open Source alongside commercial EDA software to provide use model advantages and open development f... » read more

ESL Flow is Dead


It was 20 years ago that Gary Smith coined the term [getkc id="48" comment="Electronic System Level"] (ESL). He foresaw the next logical migration in abstraction up from the [getkc id="49" comment="Register Transfer Level"] (RTL) to something that would be capable of describing and building complex electronic systems. He also saw that the future of EDA depended upon who would control that marke... » read more

Verification Facing Unique Inflection Point


The Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) attracted more than 1,100 people to San Jose last week, just slightly less than last year. While a lot of focus, and most of the glory, goes to design within semiconductor companies, it is verification where most of the advancements are happening and thus the bigger focus for DVCon. The rate of change in verification and the producti... » read more

One Flow To Rule Them All


The new mantra of shift left within EDA is nothing new and first made an appearance more than a decade ago. At that time there was a very large divide between logic synthesis and place and route. As wire delays became more important, timing closure became increasingly difficult with a logic synthesis flow that did not take that into account. The tools subsequently became tied much closer togeth... » read more

HW Vs. SW: Who’s Leading Whom?


In the past, technologies were developed in the software world that have languished until they were taken up by the hardware community. Then they were refined and polished and became fully integrated into the hardware development and verification flow. Examples are lint and formal. That was followed by attempts to migrate methodologies, such as object-oriented programming, which is the basis fo... » read more

Say Hi To Hybrid


It has been proposed for some time that virtual platforms could be linked to emulation hardware in order to co-verify the software and hardware components of an SoC. However, that proposal now has evolved into hybrid emulation, a practical solution to allow pre-silicon verification and validation of today’s complex SoC designs. First-rate work by the standards body Accellera and the Open ... » read more

ROI Not There Yet For SysML


At some point down the road in the realm of system-level design, the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) dialect of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard may drive into semiconductor design. So far, however, a return on investment has not been established for its use. SysML is defined as a general-purpose visual modeling language for systems engineering applications, and it supports the... » read more

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