Design By Architect Or Committee?


Everything we do is based on a language. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about design, verification, specification, software or mask data. They all provide a way to communicate intent, and then there are engines that work on the intent to produce something else that is desirable, also based on a language. Over time, the EDA industry has built up a hierarchy of languages from the most deta... » read more

An Update On The IEEE 1801-2013 Unified Power Format Standard


It’s been almost six years since the first IEEE 1801 standard was officially published in March of 2009, but the standard can trace its roots back to years before that date. On May 30, 2013 the IEEE released a press announcement for the most recent version of the standard, IEEE 1801-2013 (a.k.a. UPF 2.1). This brought forward a standard for the industry that is finally backed by all of the ma... » read more

Tools And Flows In 2015


This year more than 26 people provided predictions for 2015. Most of these came from the EDA industry, so the results may be rather biased. However, ecosystems are coming closer together in many parts of the semiconductor food chain, meaning that the EDA companies often can see what is happening in dependent industries and in the system design houses. Thus their predictions may have already res... » read more

Simulation Performance Driven By Model Efficiency


In real estate it’s all about location, location, location. For system level simulation it’s all about performance, performance, performance. I have heard many opinions on the performance of SystemC and TLM simulations: some positive, some negative, much of the opinion based on hearsay or other unreliable information. I believe the performance of the simulation is mainly driven by the model... » read more

Virtual Prototyping Takes Off


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Barry Spotts, senior core competency FAE for fabric and tools at [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"]; Vasan Karighattam, senior director of architecture for SoC and SSW engineering at [getentity id="22664" e_name="Open-Silicon"]; Tom De Schutter, senior product marketing manager for Virtualizer Solutions at [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"]; Larry... » read more

How Many Levels Of Abstraction Are Needed?


Recently I was having a conversation with a user who was creating cycle accurate SystemC models. My initial thought was, "Why would this be necessary?" Through the course of discussions I realized that he did have a design questions that required that level of accuracy and the simulation performance trade-offs were appropriate for his needs. His cycle accurate SystemC models were running at abo... » read more

Are Models Holding Back New Methodologies


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of the industry for [getkc id="101" kc_name="modeling"] at abstractions above [getkc id="49" kc_name="RTL"], a factor which has delayed adoption of [getkc id="104" kn_name="virtual prototypes"] and the proliferation of system-level design and hardware/software codesign. Taking part in the discussion were Frank Schirmeister, group director,... » read more

High Level Synthesis Grows Up


When Semiconductor Engineering proposed this Experts At The Table discussion, which was held at the recently concluded DVCon, [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"] had yet to express its intention to purchase [getentity id="22087" e_name="Forte"]. Little did we know that the stakes in the [gettech id="31015" comment="high-level synthesis"] (HLS) arena were being raised so high. Is this an in... » read more

Evolution Vs. Revolution


In the electronic design automation industry changes to tools and flows are nearly always evolutionary. They hide as much change from the user as possible, allowing easier justification from an ROI perspective, and they raise far fewer objections from users, who don’t have to spend time learning how to use new technology or rethink tried and true approaches to problems. Revolution in chip ... » read more

Abstractions: The Good, Bad And Ugly


Raising the level of abstraction has become almost a mantra among chipmakers and tools developers. By moving the vantage point up a couple rungs on the ladder, it’s easier to see how the individual parts of a design go together, to identify problems in the design as well as fixes to problems, and it all can happen much more quickly. That’s the theory, at least. And in most cases, it’s ... » read more

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