System-Level Verification Tackles New Role


Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, gave the keynote at DVCon this year. He said that if you pull together a bunch of pre-verified IP blocks, it does not change the verification problem at the system level. That sounds like a problem. There are assumptions made that the IP blocks work to a reasonable degree, and that when performing system-level verification the focus is not a... » read more

Verification Facing Unique Inflection Point


The Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon) attracted more than 1,100 people to San Jose last week, just slightly less than last year. While a lot of focus, and most of the glory, goes to design within semiconductor companies, it is verification where most of the advancements are happening and thus the bigger focus for DVCon. The rate of change in verification and the producti... » read more

Predictions For 2016: Tools and Flows


Seventeen companies sent in their predictions for this year with some of them sending predictions from several people. This is in addition to the CEO predictions that were recently published. That is a fine crop of views for the coming year, especially since they know that they will be held accountable for their views and this year, just like the last, they will have to answer for them. We beli... » read more

Predictions For 2016: Semiconductors, Manufacturing And Design


Seventeen companies sent in their predictions for this year with some of them sending predictions from several people. This is in addition to the CEO predictions that were recently published. That is a fine crop of views for the coming year, especially since they know that they will be held accountable for their views and this year, just like the last, they will have to answer for them. We beli... » read more

Reflections On 2015


It is easy to make predictions, but few people can make them with any degree of accuracy. Most of the time, those predictions are forgotten by the end of the year and there is no one to do a tally of who holds more credibility for next year. Not so with SemiEngineering. We like to hold people's feet to the fire, but while the Pants-On-Fire meter may be applicable to politicians, we like to thin... » read more

Reflections On 2015


It is easy to make predictions, but few people can make them with any degree of accuracy. Most of the time, those predictions are forgotten by the end of the year and there is no one to do a tally of who holds more credibility for next year. Not so with Semiconductor Engineering. We like to hold people's feet to the fire, but while the "Pants-On-Fire" meter may be applicable to politicians, we ... » read more

One Flow To Rule Them All


The new mantra of shift left within EDA is nothing new and first made an appearance more than a decade ago. At that time there was a very large divide between logic synthesis and place and route. As wire delays became more important, timing closure became increasingly difficult with a logic synthesis flow that did not take that into account. The tools subsequently became tied much closer togeth... » 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

IP Verification Challenges


At the Design Automation Conference this year, the Designer and IP tracks were the stars of the show in many ways. These sessions catered to industry rather than academia and provided engineers with information they could directly use in their jobs. Many of the sessions were filled to capacity and Anne Cirkel, general chair for the 52nd DAC, was enthusiastic about the growing success of these t... » read more

Software-Driven Verification (Part 2)


[getkc id="10" comment="Functional Verification"] has been powered by tools that require hardware to look like the kinds of systems that were being designed two decades ago. Those limitations are putting chips at risk and a new approach to the problem is long overdue. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Frank Schirrmeister, group director, product marketing for System Development Suite at [... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →