Raising The IP Abstraction Level


By Ed Sperling An increasing reliance on commercial and re-used IP and more emphasis placed on software development is adding even more pressure onto semiconductor design teams to figure out the benefits and limitations of myriad possible choices earlier in the design process. Design teams already are under pressure to meet increasingly tighter market deadlines, and it is stressing every pa... » read more

A Tale Of Two Standards


By Ed Sperling It could well be one of the strangest developments in standards history. Two competing standards for power formats were rolled out in the middle of the last decade and aside from a few cries of foul they fell below the radar screen of most chip designers and architects for a half-dozen years. Fast forward to the present and the Common Power Format (CPF) and Unified Power Form... » read more

The Growing Integration Challenge


By Ed Sperling As the number of processors and the amount of memory and IP on a chip continues to skyrocket, so does the challenge for integrating all of this stuff on a single die—or even multiple dies in the same package. There are a number of reasons why it’s getting more difficult to make all of these IP blocks work together. First of all, nothing ever stands still in design. As a r... » read more

More Intelligent Standards


There is a lot of talk these days about holistic power intent. The terminology may sound new, but the underpinnings are not. This was the idea behind the Common Power Format, which was proposed by Cadence back in 2006, and the Unified Power Format (more recently known as IEEE 1801), which was introduced the following year. These ideas were forward-looking at the time. They grasped the growi... » read more

Best Practices In Verification


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The advent of advanced verification methodologies such as the UVM and its predecessors VMM and OVM has changed the verification landscape in many ways. Design and verification teams used to worry about simulator performance (i.e., how fast the simulator runs a particular test case), but the introduction of constrained-random stimulus and functional coverage and associ... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of SystemC


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design moderated a discussion about the future of SystemC with Thomas Alsop, corporate design solution expert at Intel; Ambar Sarkar, chief verification technologist at Paradigm Works; Mike Meredith, vice president of technical marketing at Forte Design systems; David Black, certified training instructor at Doulos. Here are some of the key outtakes of that discussio... » read more

A Brief History Of Power Formats


Barry Pangrle A lot has happened in the industry in the way of power format standards over the past seven years. I’m going to attempt to hit on some of the highlights over that time period, especially with regards to the “Big 3” EDA vendors to hopefully put it all into better context for our readers. Early on, circa 2005, Mentor Graphics was working on a power format referred to as th... » read more

Too Many Standards, But Still Not Enough


By Ed Sperling The semiconductor industry has been one of the most prolific sectors in history when it comes to generating standards. Talk to any design engineer facing time-to-market pressures, new packaging approaches, and a mindboggling number of merchant IP, subsystems and interface requirements, and you’ll hear a compelling pitch for new standards. Talk to his or her boss and you’ll p... » read more

IP Tagging Resurfaces


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down with Kathy Werner, IP strategy and business manager inside of Freescale’s Design Technology Organization, to discuss tagging of soft IP. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: How new is the concept of IP tagging? Werner: IP tagging has been around for a long time. VSI Alliance was one of the first standards organizations that l... » read more

Bridging IP With Verification Standards


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Standards body Accellera is sounding the gong to summon all verification IP providers to check out its efforts in connection with IP-XACT -- IEEE 1685, "Standard for IP-XACT, Standard Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-Using IP Within Tool-Flows” – with verification IP. The IP-XACT technical committee has been busy over the past year. Formerly an effor... » read more

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