Custom Chip Verification Issues Grow


With the transition to finFETs, design conditions have grown more intense. They now include a wider PVT range and less headroom. As a result, electronic systems for applications such as mobile, consumer, and automotive increasingly are becoming more difficult to design due to the exacting performance requirements of these applications. This is particularly evident in custom design, including... » read more

Leveraging The Power Of VDMA Engines For Computer Vision Apps


It's pretty hard to overestimate the role of heterogeneous embedded systems based on Xilinx Zynq-7000 All-Programmable devices in tasks like computer vision. Many consumer electronics and specialized devices are emerging to facilitate and improve industries such as medical, automotive, security, and IoT. The combination of high-performance ARM application processing and Xilinx programmable F... » read more

Challenges Grow For IP Reuse


As chip complexity increases, so does the complexity of IP blocks being developed for those designs. That is making it much more difficult to re-use IP from one design to the next, or even to integrate new IP into an SoC. What is changing is the perception that standard [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"] works the same in every design. Moreover, well-developed [getkc id="100" kc_name="methodologie... » read more

Quality Issues Widen


As the amount of semiconductor content in cars, medical and industrial applications increases, so does the concern about how long these devices will function properly—and what exactly that means. Quality is frequently a fuzzy concept. In mobile phones, problems have ranged from bad antenna placement, which resulted in batteries draining too quickly, to features that take too long to load. ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Legal Synopsys filed suit against Ubiquiti Networks and its project leader for "circumventing technological measures that effectively control access to Synopsys' software." The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, claims that Ubiquiti used counterfeit keys obtained or created with tools from hacker websites to circumvent Synopsys' License Key system. Ubiquiti, based in San Jose, d... » read more

Better Code With RTL Linting And CDC Verification


Automated design rule checking, or linting, has been around in RTL verification for at least a couple decades, yet still many HDL designers completely ignore this simple yet very powerful bug hunting method. Why would a busy designer need to run this annoying warning generator? The hostility against using conventional linting tools is often explained by the enormous amount of output noise, limi... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics launched the company's third generation data-center friendly emulation platform, Veloce Strato. The emulator has a capacity of 2.5BG when fully loaded, and total capacity can be increased by linking emulators. It has available slots for 64 Advanced Verification Boards (AVBs) and fully loaded consumes up to 50KW (22.7 W/Mgate) of power. Aldec uncorked the latest versi... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys announced the latest version of its VCS functional verification solution, which integrates native fine-grained parallelism (FGP) and additional engine optimizations for simulation on existing x86 CPU server configurations. Aldec released the latest version of its requirements lifecycle management solutions for FPGAs/SoCs, adding certification document templates and review c... » read more

Sigasi: Cleaner VHDL And SystemVerilog


Hardware engineers always have looked at software tools and methodologies with a certain degree of envy. While the hardware side has embraced the discipline necessary to get products right prior to release, in large part because it's too expensive to fix an error in hardware, the tools and languages are generally clunkier and the methodologies are much more rigid. Like software, they have to in... » read more

Hybrid Simulation Picks Up Steam


As electronic products shift from hardware-centric to software-directed, design teams are relying increasingly on a simulation approach that includes multiple engines—and different ways to use those engines—to encompass as much of the system as possible. How engineers go about using these approaches, and even how they define them, varies greatly from one company to the next. Sometimes it... » read more

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