Blog Review: April 30


Applied Materials’ Jeremy Read points to a looming problem for the Internet of Things—legacy fabs that will require software upgrades and advanced process control. Also needed: Sensors attached to thousands of machines for predictive maintenance. Foundries are now ready for production finFETs. Cadence's Richard Goering captures the buzz at last week’s TSMC Tech Symposium, where the ro... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Cadence announced its intention to acquire Jasper Design Automation, adding formal technology to its roster of verification tools. The purchase price was about $146 million, the $170 million Cadence offered minus the $24 million in cash and equivalents on Jasper’s books. Tools Synopsys rolled out new LPDDR4 IP that offers up to 3.2 Gbps with low power consumption. The company is ... » read more

What Are EDA’s Big Three Thinking?


Over the past six weeks, the CEOs of Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics—in that order—have delivered top-down visionary messages to their user groups. Semiconductor Engineering had the opportunity to attend all three sessions, and has compiled comments from each on a variety of subjects. In some cases, all the CEOs were in sync. In others, they were not. In still others, it was difficult... » read more

Graphing Toward Standardization


Graph-based verification has become the hot topic of the day. It commanded a lot of attention at the recent DVCon, promises to fix many of the problems plaguing functional verification, can provide an automated way to perform system-level verification, enables portability of tests between simulation, emulation and prototyping, reduces the wastage created by constrained random test pattern gener... » read more

How To Improve Debug Productivity


In the realm of SoC verification world, it often takes a very short amount of time to write the testbench and the code, and the rest of the time — up to 90% — is spent debugging. After all, verification is essentially finding the bugs in a design. Debugging essentially has evolved over the years on the same path and complexity curve as design. Now debugging needs to evolve to keep pace, ... » read more

Efficiency Metrics Get Fuzzy


Not too long ago chipmakers used to measure transistors per hour and software developers would measure lines of code written per day or per week. Those metrics have fallen by the wayside—and chipmakers are still lamenting that loss. The problem is that nothing has come along to replace the old metrics, and complexity has left many chipmakers scratching their heads about how to build effici... » read more

Extending UVM To Analog


As SoC complexity has grown, so too has the need to model the analog/mixed-signal content in a similar way as the digital content to make simulation easier. One way to do this is within the context of the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). In fact, this can and is being done today with UVM as it stands, according to a number of industry sources. However, there is also growing interest... » read more

SoC Assembly And IP Reuse


I had the honor and opportunity to present at the 2014 Electronic Design Process Symposium in Monterey last Friday. This annual workshop is run by the IEEE Computer Society of Silicon Valley and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation. There were more than 30 participants each day. Most of them very experienced people with lots of technical and business responsibilities. It was ... » read more

Does Formal Have You Covered?


In part one of this roundtable, the panelists talked about the recent changes that have brought formal to the forefront of verification and discussed the challenges that the UVM have brought to formal. In this segment we start exploring those difficulties in more detail and the progress made with integrated coverage. Participating in the panel were Pete Hardee, director of product management fo... » read more

How To Shorten Hardware-Software Development Cycles


Doing more hardware-software development prior to silicon promises significant productivity and time-to-market improvements. Part of this is shifting software development “to the left,” which can compress development Last month, I blogged about “The Great Shift to the Left,” and I pointed out some of the organizational challenges associated with compressing the development cycle usin... » read more

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