Improving Concurrent Chip Design, Manufacturing, And Test Flows


Semiconductor design, manufacturing, and test are becoming much more tightly integrated as the chip industry seeks to optimize designs using fewer engineers, setting the stage for greater efficiencies and potentially lower chip costs without just relying on economies of scale. The glue between these various processes is data, and the chip industry is working to weave together various steps t... » read more

New Processor Fuzzing Mechanism


Researchers from Boston University and University of Washington published a technical paper titled "ProcessorFuzz: Guiding Processor Fuzzing using Control and Status Registers." Abstract "As the complexity of modern processors has increased over the years, developing effective verification strategies to identify bugs prior to manufacturing has become critical. Undiscovered micro-architectur... » read more

ML And UVM Share Same Flaws


A number of people must be scratching their heads over what UVM and machine learning (ML) have in common, such that they can be described as having the same flaws. In both cases, it is a flaw of omission in some sense. Let's start with ML, and in particular, object recognition. A decade ago, Alexnet, coupled with GPUs, managed to beat all of the object detection systems that relied on tradit... » read more

Is AI Improving A Broken Process?


Verification is fundamentally comparing two models, each derived independently, to find out if there are any different behaviors expressed between the two models. One of those models represents the intended design, and the other is part of the testbench. In an ideal flow, the design model would be derived from the specification, and each stage of the design process would be adding other deta... » read more

Verification Signoff Beyond Coverage


A common design view of verification signoff is to start with a comprehensive verification plan, covering every requirement defined among specifications and use-cases, the architectural definition, and any other relevant documents. Tests are then developed to cover every feature of the verification plan. Those tests are run and debugged, and identified issues are addressed within the design. Th... » read more

Ethical Coverage


How many times have you heard statements such as, "The verification task quadruples when the design size doubles?" The implication is that every register bit that is created has doubled the state space of the design. It gives the impression that complete verification is hopeless, and because of that little progress has been made in coming up with real coverage metrics. When constrained rando... » read more

Dependable Verification Is The Foundation ICs Require


As our world becomes increasingly high-tech, it is easy to lose sight of the little things that make all of our fancy gadgets achieve optimal performance. The one thread that enables you to get all of the benefits of a new laptop, tablet, smartphone, or your automobile’s digital dashboard and connects the components that ensure best performance is the integrated circuit (IC). For as breath... » read more

Veloce Coverage App And Veloce Assertion App Deliver Unified Coverage Methodology


The interoperability of the Veloce Coverage app and the Veloce Assertion app with other verification engines (simulation and formal) enables merging coverage collected by each engine and provides a cohesive coverage closure report and analysis flow. It enables the verification team and product-level management to make important decisions such as coverage closure sign-off, test quality analysis ... » read more

Bug Hunt! Spiraling In On Formal Coverage Closure


By Mark Eslinger and Jin Hou Many companies have used formal verification to verify complex SoCs and safety-critical designs. Using formal verification to confirm design functionalities and to uncover functional bugs is emerging as an efficient verification approach. Although formal verification will not handle the complexity of a design at the SoC level, it is an efficient tool to verify th... » read more

Challenges With Stacking Memory On Logic


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the changes in design tools and methodologies needed for 3D-ICs, with Sooyong Kim, director and product specialist for 3D-IC at Ansys; Kenneth Larsen, product marketing director at Synopsys; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens EDA; and Vinay Patwardhan, product management group director at Cadence... » read more

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