An Automated Approach To RTL Memory BIST Insertion And Verification


ASIC vendors have been traditionally incorporating built-in self test (BIST) and repair solutions in their customers' gate level netlist. This used to be the common industry practice for technology nodes of 65 nm and older. Designers were comfortable writing in-house Perl scripts to replace memory instances with combined memory-BIST (MBIST) instances and make necessary connections. However, for... » read more

RTL Power Reduction Triathlon


Unless you’ve just come out of a week-long coma, you’ve been watching at least part of the Olympic Games in London. The years of training, the drama of competition, the thrill of victory… (you know the rest). Some contests come down to the smallest of margins to define who wins gold. The recent women’s triathlon is one such case. After a 500-meter swim, a 43-kilometer bike ride and a 10... » read more

Looking for a Sure Thing


By Mike Gianfagna Have you ever walked into a new car showroom and been told by the sales person that all cars were sold “as-is,” with no warranty? I doubt anyone would buy a car at a place like that. High-end cars can have more than 80 distinct electronic control systems on-board, each powered by various SoCs. And each of those SoCs contains many IP blocks sourced from multiple suppliers.... » read more

Experts At The Table: Coherency


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss coherency with Mirit Fromovich, principal solutions engineer at Cadence; Drew Wingard, CTO of Sonics; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta, and Marcello Coppola, technical director at STMicroelectronics. What follow are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: How do we bring software more in line with the hardware to impr... » read more

Experts At The Table: Coherency


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss coherency with Mirit Fromovich, principal solutions engineer at Cadence; Drew Wingard, CTO of Sonics; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta, and Marcello Coppola, technical director at STMicroelectronics. What follow are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: What’s driving coherency and what sort of issues are you encou... » read more

Experts At The Table: Does 20nm Break System-Level Design?


By Ann Steffora Mutschler System-Level Design sat down to discuss design at 20nm with Drew Wingard, chief technology officer at Sonics; Kelvin Low, deputy director of product marketing at GlobalFoundries, Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for system development in the system and software realization group at Cadence; and Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at At... » read more

Increasing Certainty For 20nm Design


By Frank Schirrmeister At the recent Design Automation Conference two topics were getting very special attention: Design at 20nm and System-Level Design. This is very indicative of the very opposite trends we have been facing in semiconductor designs for the last couple of decades. On the one hand, the actual design units get smaller and smaller, and we are today happily designing for technolo... » read more

Experts At The Table: Pain Points


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down with Vinod Kariat, a Cadence fellow; Premal Buch, vice president of software engineering at Altera; Vic Kulkarni, general manager of Apache Design; Bernard Murphy, CTO at Atrenta, and Laurent Moll, CTO at Arteris. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: With stacked die it’s no longer one company making an SoC. W... » read more

Experts At The Table: Does 20nm Break System-Level Design?


By Ann Steffora Mutschler System-Level Design sat down to discuss design at 20nm with Drew Wingard, chief technology officer at Sonics; Kelvin Low, deputy director of product marketing at GlobalFoundries, Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for system development in the system and software realization group at Cadence; and Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atr... » read more

Bridging The Rift Between Software And Hardware


By Ed Sperling As more computing is done on mobile devices rather than desktops, the idea of what constitutes good application software is changing. This addresses the key reason why some of advanced power-saving features built into chips were not utilized by software in the past. Unless the operating systems were specifically written for mobile devices, such as Android and iOS, the real f... » read more

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