Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power verification with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys; and Venki Venkatesh, senior director of engineering at Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

Observation Post


By Pranav Ashar After attending the 2013 Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) in San Jose, Calif., I have compiled notes as both an observer and a panel participant. Here are my observations: Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave the keynote presentation: Accelerating EDA Innovation Through SoC Design Methodology Convergence. Logically and effectively he made the case that SoC in... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power verification with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys; and Venki Venkatesh, senior director of engineering at Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

Version Control


By Ed Sperling & Ann Steffora Mutschler One of the biggest impediments to progress in semiconductor design is progress itself—version after version of specifications, formats and increasingly IP. In fact, there are so many different versions, some of which conflict directly with each other, that it may take months or even years before some customers adopt new products. Much has ... » read more

Guesswork, And Other Design Paradigms


PPA for soft IP seems like an oxymoron. How do you determine the implementation characteristics (PPA — Power, Performance and Area) for something that has not yet been implemented? Flying blind until implementation would be a rookie move. More likely you are going to estimate based on a prior implementation. Not a bad approach if the IP hasn’t changed significantly and the target library is... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Trouble With Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power verification with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys; and Venki Venkatesh, senior director of engineering at Atrenta. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

Raising The Stakes For IP


By Ed Sperling As the amount of IP in an SoC increases, so do the number of players who want to strengthen their position in this market. The big acquisitions that began several years ago over time have proved to be just opening salvos—something that was impossible to predict when this shift began. Synopsys’ purchase of Virage Logic and Cadence’s purchase of Denali, both of which occu... » read more

New Issues In Signoff


By Ed Sperling Signoff has always been a challenge at every stage of an SoC design flow. No matter how good a design looks, or how well a prototype works, there are still problems that can crop up at any stage of the design flow all the way into manufacturing that can leave engineering teams shaking their heads. Even at mainstream process nodes, respins are common. At advanced nodes—part... » read more

SoC Derivatives Made Easy


Today’s system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs are creating more challenges than ever – challenges that demand bringing the product to market faster, before the competition does. The electronics industry and growing competition require that SoC’s achieve a short time to market (TTM) while design complexity continues to grow at a rapid rate. Another challenge is to keep the SoC design and overall ... » read more

Uncommon Goals


I had the opportunity to attend the Common Platform event recently. This is a technology and business showcase sponsored by Global Foundries, IBM and Samsung with major support from ARM, Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor. Wow, that’s some serious sponsorship. The event was well run and provided a good balance of technology details and business outlook. The wine at the evening reception was decent ... » read more

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