The Race For Better Verification


SoC verification is gearing up for renewed competition among the big vendors and verification-only companies like Real Intent. They are delivering their next-generation SoC verification suites with a focus on specific areas of concern. Clock-domain crossing, X-verification and reset optimization, SDC correctness and consistency, are some of the areas that are receiving dedicated RTL analysis us... » read more

Coming Up With The Wrong Formal Answer


It was a surreal moment. I was sitting in a conference room in Portland listening to a panel session about [getkc id="33" kc_name="formal"] methods. The topic was discussing the fact that there is insufficient education at the undergraduate level in formal methods and algorithmic approaches to verification. You can read about the panel here. In the question and answer session, a point was ma... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of verification with Janick Bergeron, Synopsys fellow; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for the Cadence System Development Suite; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; and Yunshan Zhu, vice president of new technologies at Atrenta. What foll... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of verification with Janick Bergeron, Synopsys fellow; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for the Cadence System Development Suite; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; and Yunshan Zhu, vice president of new technologies at Atrenta. What foll... » read more

Experts At The Table: Debug


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Galen Blake, senior verification engineer at Altera; Warren Stapleton, senior fellow at Advanced Micro Devices; Stephen Bailey, director of solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Michael Sanie, senior director of verification marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: There are separate areas being created in devices, s... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of verification with Janick Bergeron, Synopsys fellow; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for the Cadence System Development Suite; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; and Yunshan Zhu, vice president of new technologies at Atrenta. What foll... » read more

Time To Rethink Verification


Verification traditionally has followed the path of the design team. When they change their methodology or tooling, verification engineers follow and attempts to incorporate it into their flow. The few times in the past when verification has attempted to lead, it has not ended well. An example of this was the attempt to get design teams using assertions. Assertions are proven to be valuable ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Debug


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Galen Blake, senior verification engineer at Altera; Warren Stapleton, senior fellow at Advanced Micro Devices; Stephen Bailey, director of solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Michael Sanie, senior director of verification marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The amount of IP is increasing and i... » read more

Tackling Verification Challenges With Interconnect Validation Tool


An interconnect, also referred to as a bus matrix or fabric, serves as the communication hub of multiple intellectual property (IP) cores inside a system on chip (SoC). As the capacity of today’s SoCs continues to increase dramatically, interconnect verification complexity also grows, considering the master/slave numbers, various protocols, different kinds of transactions, and multi-layered t... » read more

The Brave New World Of FinFETs


SoCs using 16nm and 14nm finFETs are expected to begin rolling out next year using a 20nm back-end-of-line process. While the initial performance and power numbers are looking very promising, the challenges of designing and building these complex chips are daunting—and there are more problems on the way. First, the good news. Initial results from foundries show a 150% improvement in perfor... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →