SoC Verification Made Easy With Aldec HES-DVM


As designs grow larger, the time spent verifying a project is growing longer as well. As a solution, some companies are trying to ‘shift-left’ their schedules. Verification via software simulators is not fast enough for large System-on-Chip (SoC) design projects, therefore one option is to use an FPGA emulator to speed up the design process. But what happens when a bug occurs? This document... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 9


Doulos' John Aynsley explains in a guest blog for Aldec why FPGA designers need to know SystemVerilog and UVM. Might be time to increase the coffee budget. Speaking of verification, Cadence's Frank Schirrmeister notes that his company is joining forces with Mentor Graphics and Breker for a contribution to the Accellera Portable Stimulus Working Group. This is potentially a big deal in veri... » read more

Can Cars Be Hack-Proof?


Not many days go by when there isn't a news headline describing the latest hacking attempt — or success — of an automobile or automotive system. Malicious hacking has been around almost since the dawn of connected electronics, but it's happening with increasing sophistication in the automotive sector. Even high-end vehicles suffer security flaws that are too costly or not worthwhile to f... » read more

Rethinking Differentiation


Differentiation is becoming more difficult, more time-consuming, and in some cases much more expensive for chipmakers. The traditional metrics of faster performance, lower power and less area/cost, which are leftovers from the PC era, no longer are a guarantee of success despite the fact that they are still baseline metrics for many designs. Even new metrics such as ecosystem completeness, w... » read more

Software Driving More Hardware Designs


The influence of software engineers is growing inside of chip and systems companies, reversing a decades-old trend of matching the software to the fastest or most power-efficient hardware and raising as-yet unanswered questions about what will change in SoC design. The shift is particularly evident in chips developed for high-volume markets such as mobile phones and tablets. It's also happen... » read more

Developing High-Reliability FPGAs For DO-254


You have been developing FPGAs for a long time, and you know your designs from top to bottom. You know every interface protocol, configuration and optimization. You can visualize your timing diagram like you can visualize your upcoming vacation in Hawaii. You can manually write down your memory mapping accurately while under oath. You can pinpoint all CDC paths and emulate metastability in your... » read more

Introduction To DO-254


For almost two decades, avionics system manufacturers have only had to adhere to DO-178 for the development of airborne software. RTCA/DO-178A was recognized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1985 for the development of airborne software, but RTCA/DO-254 was only recognized by the FAA in 2005 for the development of airborne electronic hardware (AEH). Developers of AEH are now face... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 26


Synopsys' Marc Greenberg attended IDF and learned more about the newly announced Intel/Micron 3D XPoint memory technology named Optane including initial ship dates and some implementation details. In concluding his analysis of the 2014 Functional Verification Study, Mentor's Harry Foster reveals an unexpected finding about design size and respins. How do you keep your power grid from bein... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Summit Research reports on the proposed buyout of Micron by China's Tsinghua Unigroup. New York Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter urging the United States to block any potential sale of the Boise memory-chip maker to the group. Summit states the Tsinghua investment is more likely to be a stake in Micron that specifically forbids certain IP to be made available in order to protect national se... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 5


Fresh from the July 2015 Type-C InterOp Event, where USB engineers wheel a prototype on a cart from hotel room to hotel room, testing interoperability, Synopsys' Morten Christiansen says Type-C has arrived. Mentor's Colin Walls discusses the reasons to tackle embedded software development with a bottom-up approach. In their latest video, Cadence's Kishore Kasamsetty discusses why choose L... » read more

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